From pest to global luxury - Sea Urchin feasting at The Roe
In the eastern Melbourne suburb of Glen Waverley sits Australia’s first, and still only, restaurant entirely devoted to sea urchin. The Roe is a love letter to the spiky, orange-gold delicacy the Japanese call uni and Australians have only recently learned to treasure. More remarkably, every silky spoonful you eat here helps save the Great Barrier Reef and Tasmania’s underwater kelp forests.
Walk through the discreet entrance and you immediately sense something different. Upstairs, a small museum traces the journey of the Australian sea urchin from reef pest to global luxury. Downstairs, a gleaming processing facility hums with divers’ crates arriving straight off the boat. And at the heart of it all is a 20-seat chef’s table where founder Jessica Teoh, managing director James Liew, and head chef Johnson Teoh turn what was once considered a marine nuisance into one of the most coveted ingredients on earth.
The experience begins, unexpectedly, with breakfast reimagined. Fluffy scrambled eggs arrive on thick toast slathered with sea-urchin butter and dusted with a house-made uni seasoning that delivers an immediate umami punch. Beside it sits a glass bottle of cold-brew coffee infused with sea urchin – oceanic, slightly nutty, and utterly addictive. It sounds outrageous until the first sip; then it simply feels inevitable.
The real theatre unfolds downstairs. A radish refresher cleanses the palate before the parade begins: Roe MateKi hand rolls filled with warm rice lightly kissed with sea-urchin rice wine; fried oysters crowned with a cloud of sea-urchin cream; the Signature Platter, a gleaming mosaic of pristine uni arranged like jewellery. Then comes hot-and-sour sea-urchin fried rice perfumed with black truffle oil, followed by luxe raw long-spike sea urchin and a delightful seafood roll. Dessert is sea-urchin popcorn ice cream – caramelised kernels folded into a creamy base that somehow balances salt, sweet, and brine in a single spoonful. Plates return to the kitchen polished clean.
What elevates The Roe beyond mere indulgence is the story behind every tray. Sea urchins, particularly the long-spike species (Heliocidaris erythrogramma), have exploded in numbers along Australia’s southern coasts, devouring kelp forests and creating “urchin barrens” that threaten entire ecosystems. By harvesting them for food, The Roe removes tens of thousands of urchins each year, allowing reefs to regenerate. Consumption becomes conservation.
Quality is ruthless. Divers work by hand in freezing waters, selecting only the healthiest specimens. Back at the facility, every urchin is cracked, cleaned, and graded on texture, creaminess, sweetness, and colour. Fewer than thirty percent make the premium grade that leaves for Tokyo’s Toyosu Market or graces plates in Glen Waverley. The rest are processed into pastes, seasonings, and that now-famous uni butter.
The numbers are staggering. In January this year, 250 grams of The Roe’s long-spike uni sold at Toyosu for over $7,000 AUD – roughly $28,000 per kilogram, expensivd like the price of actual gold. We were told that judges at the market, the spiritual home of uni appreciation, have declared sea urchin from The Roe as the finest in the world, praising its electric orange hue and almost tropical sweetness. Australia exported 500 tonnes of sea urchin last year, yet remains a baby industry compared to Japan, Canada, or Chile. The consensus among those who have tasted them all: the smallest player has the best product.
Jessica Teoh’s original vision was simple but radical: take an ingredient most Australians had never considered edible, build an entire culinary universe around it, and in doing so protect the reefs she grew up diving. With James Liew steering operations and Johnson Teoh translating urchins into poetry on the plate, that vision has become reality. The waiting list for the chef’s table now stretches months ahead, drawing food pilgrims from Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles who happily fly in for lunch and leave converted.
Walking out of The Roe, the summer air feels different. You have eaten one of the rarest, most expensive ingredients on the planet, prepared with invention and reverence, and somehow the ocean is marginally healthier because of it. Guilt-free decadence is a phrase thrown around too lightly in food writing. Here, for once, it is literal. Every luscious, trembling tongue of uni is proof that luxury and environmental repair can occupy the same plate.
If you have even a passing interest in flavour, sustainability, or the sheer audacity of turning a reef pest into the gold of the sea, book The Roe immediately. Bring an empty stomach and an open mind. The urchins – and the planet – will thank you.