Sea Salt Fish & Sushi Bar

Renovated, gotten quite a bit (2 or 3 times) bigger since I last visited.
They took my order down wrong, but no big deal. Seating is nice inside, and open plan but decided to take away — neat take away containers, I must say.
Didn’t try the sushi bar, however for fish & chips, A-​OK. Noting overly great, but not bad either. I like the herbed salt they season the chips with, yummy

Very friendly service… the girls were just so bubbly and smiling all the time, which is a nice welcome after a long day of shopping. I ordered fisherman basket for one and couldn’t even finish it! The portions are quite decent so two people can easily share the items listed for 1 person on their menu. The restaurant was spacious and very clean and had plenty of tables for large groups. I will definitely frequent this place again!

Fantastic deep fried flake and salad. The fish batter was crispy not greasy, and the color and flesh delightful. It sits on a real tomato salad, not the usual sea of cheap green lettuce. Only thing I’d like is to know is what the dressing is. Some soft fetta cheese in the salad would be perfect. I could only find traces of something. It’s not cheap here but you don’t have to hunt for your lemon or quality tartare, it’s all there on your plate. Their price per kilo for their fresh salmon, flathead etc leave me speechless however. Their various fish burgers are quite good though, as strange as that may sound.

Honestly, I’m not really sure if I’m digging the whole Fish & Chips scene as WELL as being a sushi bar. I’m a fan of restaurants having their specialisations and then being fucking GOOD at them. But hey, who knows it might be great.
Ambiance: Don’t expect anything too big. Even though this location is quite popular with students (being so close to Melbourne University), it’s still a small little takeaway shop with less than impressive looks.
Customer Service: You do get pretty good service here. The people are energetic and my food came out quickly.
Food: I took a look at their sushi prices and they were OVERPRICED. 2.70 for Seafood Inari? Not filling and you can get that for much cheaper elsewhere. I moved on to the Fish & Chips (with tartar sauce and lemon), which came at little under 10 dollars.
At first glance, the Fish & Chips seemed a bit small. However, it surprisingly ended up to be quite filling. The fish was tender and great and the chips were decent. Normally I like some delicious thick chips with my battered fish; the chips here were a bit thin. Still fresh and delicious though!
—
Looking at the prices of Sea Salt, some of it may just not be worth it. However, 10 dollars for some Fish & Chips isn’t so bad — especially the ones of this quality. Sea Salt is definitely nowhere to rave about, but I wouldn’t skip over it if you’re looking for a tasty snack.

Fish and sushi bars are one in a million these days. However, I appreciate this because sushi is a classic lunch time option and will leave me happy as I feel full but not weighed down. The greatest thing about Seasalt is, when you catch up with friends, there’s a good chance at least one will be hungover, so you can get your sushi while they can get their greasy fish and chips meal.
Seasalt just know how to make great sushi hand rolls. The tuna salad is a classic and their salmon is not sad and weird or warm. The seaweed salad strikes the perfect balance between sesame and chilli and will not disappoint.
Big props to these guys for figuring it out, it is absolutely one of my favourite sushi chains. Ripper.

A sushi bar that also sells fried fish’n’chips. Not a very usual combination nor one that inspires a huge amount of confidence, but the food at Sea Salt is very decent considering the low prices. The sushi is good quality and great for a snack if you’re on your way to a movie at Nova. Crispy fried salmon, salty unagi, spicy tuna — yum. And heaps of the varieties also come in brown rice options.
The fish and chips are what you’d expect from a joint that specialises in affordable student fry-​ups. But the deals can’t be sniffed at — three fish bites and chips for $ 5.90 is a winner.
It’s not easy finding seats inside most of the time, so the best dine-​in option is squishing up at a table out the front. When it’s busy, space is tight and the hard-​working staff don’t have a lot of time to clean up. It’s a ‘get in, scoff it down and don’t worry about the mess’ kind of a deal.

My partner and I came here as a last minuet ‘hey lets just get some fish and chips’ meal. What we didn’t expect was what kind of ‘fish and chip’ store this place turned out to be.
For starters, it’s not your local deep fry joint where some greasy looking teenager serves you.
The fish is fresh and on display in a glass cabinet where you can choose your fillet, they also sell sushi here.
The main difference about this place was the price, my god. It was so bloody expensive. My partner bought 1 fillet of fish and some wedges and it cost $ 27…yup $ 27. It wasn’t big either; I probably could have eaten 2 quite comfortably.
Now I don’t know if it was that expensive because that was its base price for one, then if you add more fillets the price only goes up by a few dollars… but wow. We were shocked… maybe we bought a really expensive type?
In their defense, it tasted amazing, it wasn’t just some deep friend piece of something. It really had excellent flavoring and was probably one of the tastiest fish pieces I’ve ever had to date. The coating was light and crunchy, but hardly oily (despite being fried).
Worth the money though? Maybe if I weren’t a poor struggling uni student, I wouldn’t mind. But for now, maybe not.

Lynne Truss would be all over the tag line for this so-​so little fish and chip slash sushi shop: «Fish for Life!» No thanks; I’m a fish phobic, but while we’re on the subject is this an idiomatic — and not very commercially savvy — spin on that whole ‘teach a man to fish’ bit?
Grammar and unsavoury sea derived sub-​specialty aside, Sea Salt also boasts a rather fine looking selection of sushi at around $ 2.80 a roll. ‘Looking’ being the operative word. My boyfriend decided it would be sage to order fresh fish sushi to get the measure of this little Carlton sushi bar as we’d not visited it before. He needn’t have bothered.
Sea Salt’s sushi isn’t even made with authentic sushi rice and the fillings — I tried crispy chicken and spicy chicken, yes, chicken is my poison — erred on the side of tasteless. I don’t know how you can render fried chicken tasteless but somehow Sea Salt manages. Pretty disappointing all round. Oh well, plenty more fish in the sea.

It’s all about the fried food at Sea Salt. I never thought I liked fish burgers until I had theirs — they’re light and crispy, nothing like anything I’d had before. For me, The Sea Salt Burger (the original and best because it comes with chips included) is the perfect fast meal if you’re in a hurry to get to the cinema.
There is sushi available if you’re after a lighter option, but I don’t rate it (the spicy prawn hand roll is too unnaturally pink for my liking). Instead I’d recommend a grilled piece of the day’s special fish and a salad.
Unlike most local fish n’ chippers, Sea Salt is ultra clean and modern so you don’t need to worry about the food ‘revisiting’ later. They’ve got a television in the corner so you can watch obnoxious pop music videos from both inside or at the tables on the street, and the indoor tables and stools are almost stylish. It’s nothing like the slimy, smelly fish and chip shops of my childhood — but I repeat, avoid the sushi!

The name pretty much encapsulates this place. It’s my favourite pre-​movie snack joint in Carlton. The best thing about Sea Salt is that you can be naughty or nice. If you feel like you’re about to smash a few beers at the cinema and possibly a few more afterwards, what better opportunity to line your stomach with some greasy F&C’s beforehand. That’s not to say they’re particularly greasy. On the contrary, Sea Salt serve up about the least grease drenched fodder in town. But if you feel like being a bit more healthy, the sushi option is always there.
A trick here is the fish-​bite snack. For a smidge over a fiver, you can pick up a killer little bowl of crispy chips, tartare sauce, a wee (token) salad and a few bite-​size morsels of fish. You can bulk it out with a sushi hand roll or a couple of calamari rings and make a meal of it, or simply whip down a snack on the run to the movies.

It was approaching mid afternoon and I hadn’t had any sushi yet. I was starting to panic. I took stock and cast through my dedicated memory of all things sushi. I was in Carlton where I was more likely to find a Tiramisu wrapped in seaweed than a rice filled piece of heaven. But my memory served me well — a ten minute walk down the road was where I correctly remembered a sushi place to be. I walked there fast.
Arriving slightly out of breath I looked through the front window to all the beautiful sushi all laid out like candy in a lolly shop. I wiped the dribble from my chin and entered the front door. Before the women could wish me a good day I demanded a selection of fresh tuna, crispy chicken, seaweed salad, avocado and prawn sushi rolls. She got me a plate and grabbed my order as quickly as she could — she seemed to know the seriousness of the situation.
It was at this point that I had time to take stock of where I actually was. I looked up at the menu board behind the counter and realised I was in a sushi/​fish & chip takeaway. It was at this point it dawned on me that I had probably just made a big mistake.
The Tuna was perfectly fresh, the crispy chicken oh so crispy and so on. But there was something wrong with this sushi that I couldn’t at first put my finger on. Was the rice overcooked? Or was I just being fussy? No. Eventually I figured it was because the rice in this sushi was normal medium grain rice — not the proper sushi
(short grain) rice. Now you may think I am being over caring here — but you are wrong and have clearly never eaten medium grain rice. It is tasteless and very starchy. It sticks to the bottom and tops of your mouth leaving a horrible feeling that maybe only eating cold fatty sausages can top. I was very disappointed. There is a very clear reason why medium grain rice is the cheapest variety on the market — no one wants to eat it!
So I learned my lesson. Don’t buy sushi from a fish and chip shop. If it’s any constellation the fish looked very fresh and the chips looked good too. So I would definitely consider going to this place again. I just won’t be buying any sushi.