Ten years after its first poke counter opened, Australian fast-casual chain Fishbowl is retiring the name entirely — every store in Sydney, Melbourne, the Gold Coast and Brisbane will trade as Thisbowl by mid-October.

The rebrand is menu economics, not nostalgia. Fishbowl built its business on seafood, but the chain spent years widening its protein mix toward chicken, tofu and beef. A name anchored to fish no longer described what customers were actually ordering — or what the kitchen could sell at scale. So the founders killed it.

"When we launched in New York, we changed the name to Thisbowl because that's the whole idea: there's a bowl for you, whoever you are, whatever you're craving," co-founder Nathan Dalah said. "Fishbowl is where we started. Thisbowl is where we've arrived, and we have much more coming."

The U.S. flagship came first. Dalah and co-founders Casper Ettelson and Nic Pestalozzi opened the initial Thisbowl location in New York in 2024, and that pilot has since grown to four sites. Australia is now following, converting the entire home-market estate in one push.

What does the rebrand change on the ground?

The anchor is Bondi Beach. Thisbowl will reopen its original location there on 26 September as the group's flagship — twice the size of the old store, seating 72 customers across indoor and outdoor space. It's a deliberate statement: the chain started at Bondi, and it's returning there with a bigger box and a new identity.

The Bondi store also carries the new menu engineering. Thisbowl debuts its first dessert there — a limited mango soft serve sundae with miso banana bread, strawberry sauce and macadamia nuts, developed with Gelato Messina — plus house sodas in flavors like passionfruit and yuzu. For a chain built on savory lunch bowls, that's a check-average play: dessert and drinks are the cheapest ways to lift spend per visit without touching the core protein lineup.

"Launching Thisbowl in Bondi feels like such a true homecoming," Pestalozzi said. "From Day 1, it's been our goal to create something that combines art, design, music, movement, fashion, and food."

What comes next

The conversion timeline is tight. All Australian stores carry the Thisbowl name by mid-October, and the founders are framing the rebrand as a beginning rather than a finish — Dalah's "much more coming" points to further expansion on top of the four New York-area sites already trading under the new banner.

For a 10-year-old brand with protein offerings that long ago outgrew its seafood identity, the question now is whether the broader "bowl for everyone" positioning can carry the chain through its second decade at pace.