Famous Casula Fish Market

 This blog post offers a fairly comprehensive description of every business in the Fish Market, and what their offerings are. It starts with Fresh fish, and then moves through all the prepared food offerings, based on my visit in 2018.  Anyone who is a fan of fish (as in eating it) should consider a few hours at the Sydney Fish Markets, located in the Pyrmont neighborhood of the Greater Sydney area. According to their site, they are the largest market “of their kind” in the southern hemisphere (but that’s actually a very vague statement, so I’m not sure what it means exactly).

 

Sydney Fish Market (SFM) is the largest of its kind in the southern hemisphere – an icon of Australia’s seafood industry that incorporates both retail and wholesale trading and a working fishing fleet. It attracts around three million visits a year and is a major attraction for tourism, including Sydneysiders, interstate and international visitors. More than 500 seafood species are traded through the site and supply thousands of fish shops and restaurants across Sydney.  SFM commissioned Deloitte Access Economics to conduct an economic contribution study and analyse its wider economic and social impact. The impacts were explored using data provided by SFM, a dedicated consumer survey, and consultations with wholesale and retail tenants at SFM and the catching industry.

 

That said, the place is fairly large, a bit labyrinth-like, and offers an almost overwhelming number of options to the first time visitor (so reading a blog post like this before going really could help you make some decisions). While I’m guessing at these numbers, the place seemed to be 50% a full-fledged Fish Market Australia offering freshly caught raw fish (or what the Aussies call “wet fish”), about 40% is fast-food stalls where you can gorge-out on pre-cooked (displayed) fishy delights — a lot of deep fried or smothered in cheese– until you need to loosen your pants, and about 10% is normal sit down restaurants (for the boring) that specialize in fish — most of which are Chinese food (probably because the majority of the tourists that like to come here seem to be from China — and in my whole life I’ve only met ONE person who didn’t like Chinese food).

 

As you walk around, especially if you get there earlier in the morning (before 11am), you quickly realize that this place is a bona-fide fish market, in that it is the city’s wholesale (i.e. bulk sales) hub for products to restaurants, and other businesses, as well as offering retail sales (small sales) to the public. I’ve been to a few “fisherman’s wharf’s” over the past few years, and till and as such was expecting this one, like those, to have degraded into a tourist trap (because of changes in the fishing industry) … that is not the case here. This is the real McCoy. The auctions of the morning’s catch begin at around 6:30 am, while the onsite restaurants and other shops intended for the public open up for business a few hours later, at 9am and close at 4pm.