And then Niland brings up dessert, which at his Sydney restaurant can often mean fish-eye ice cream. “The vitreous humor of an eye has similar properties to that of an egg yolk,” he explains.

Welcome to Restaurant Iris: 18 courses of extraordinary, locavore new Nordic cuisine on a floating stainless-steel orb called Salmon Eye bobbing in the frigid waters of the Hardangerfjord.

The preparations don’t stray too far from classic donburi, but the eye-catching aspect of these boxes might be the scale: the Deluxe Box, for example, is a $50 powerhouse of ikura, Hokkaido ...