Cyril’s Fine Foods, a Sydney institution

A word of warning before you visit Cyril’s Fine Foods – Cyril may charm you into buying more of his fine foods than you intended.

If you are into food and you happen to be in the Haymarket area, I definitely recommend you poke your head in and take a look. The store is on Hay St, across the road from the Capitol Theatre. Baskets of food and a blackboard of daily specials on the pavement will lure you into the store. Inside, it is bright and clean and spacious and the food is interesting. It’s an old-fashioned delicatessen but not one that is dusty and cluttered, where you feel like you’re going to knock a teetering display over at any moment.

The centre of Sydney doesn’t really have delicatessens to speak of, aside from Cyril’s. There’s the David Jones Food Hall but it’s expensive and I find it surprisingly limited in its range if you’re not there for meat or fish or cheese. Cyril’s is a good place to go if you need something beyond the usual supermarket fare.

I swung by after my lamington excursion yesterday. I was just looking and then I remembered that I needed pomegranate molasses to make my favourite eggplant stew and I hadn’t yet tracked down a convenient source. Folks on Twitter were pointing me in the direction of Marrickville or Willoughby but I knew there had to be something closer to the city.

I walked in and Cyril greeted me and complimented me on my beautiful babies. He told me that became brother to twin sisters when he was eight years old and how he still remembers his father standing with a baby girl under each arm. We bonded over this and then he asked me what he could sell me. “Oh no, I’m just looking,” I said. Ten minutes later I had spent $27 on pomegranate molasses, chocolates and biscuits, and a jar of marinated wild mushrooms from Poland.

I guess you would expect the man to know a thing or two about selling his wares given that he said he had run the delicatessen for 57 years. It’s a Sydney institution and it will be a sad day if it ever goes or even when it’s no longer Cyril behind the till.

He knows a thing or two about food too. He said it was his mission to stock food that was a bit unusual and was hard to find anywhere else. We talked about the smoked eel in the fridge and he described how they have to purify eel in clean water for a few days because of all the gunk in its guts – a similar idea to the process of purifying snails with a clean diet before you eat them. The fridge also had a pork terrine in the shape of a suckling pig, which he thought would be a great centrepiece for a party but I secretly found a little scary. Of course, he had all sorts of small goods and cheese and a plentiful supply of European biscuits and chocolates (currently on special).

I bought the jar of marinated forest mushrooms (mostly chanterelles) from Poland because he raved about how good they were. I mentioned the recent incident where diners in Canberra were accidentally poisoned by eating the wrong type of mushroom. He agreed that it was sad but suggested that if you went foraging and you weren’t 100% sure about a mushroom, you could lick it to see if it tasted bitter. “It’s the old way but it works,” he said. Hmmm… I won’t be trying that method! But I’ve foraged for chanterelles in Scotland with my aunt and I know they don’t have any poisonous doppelgangers, so I’m not worried.

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