It hasn’t opened yet but the gulls are already squawking at Sydney’s new fish market, which looms over its smaller, bluer, but much-loved sibling next door.
The new building – a timber and glass behemoth – soars over Blackwattle Bay and is a hive of construction as 40 vendors and restaurants work to fit out their new stalls. An amphitheatre of grey concrete sits waiting for hoards of seafood-lovers to stain its steps with discarded chips and butter-drenched fillets.
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The New South Wales government said on Thursday it would hand over the keys to the structure next month to the company that runs the market, which has operated at its old site since 1966.
But Sydneysiders want to know: where will they buy their Christmas prawns?
“Great question: you’ll be buying your prawns for Christmas, I can say that with confidence,” Daniel Jarosch, the CEO of Sydney Fish Market, says, without specifying whether it will be at the new or old site. He addsthat an official opening date will be revealed “imminently”.
“We are focused on ensuring that we have a successful opening. We deserve a successful opening for this wonderful facility.”
The new fish market was scheduled to open in late 2024, but the timeline blew out amid construction delays and tense negotiations with grandfathered seafood vendors, who only signed new leases a few months ago. On Thursday, Jarosch and the NSW premier, Chris Minns, said they couldn’t give a firm date on when the new fish market will welcome patrons, or whether Sydneysiders can hope to stroll through its briny halls before holiday meal planning begins.
“You can see inside … they are hauling ass in there at the moment,” Minns says while touring the market. “This is going to be fantastic for Sydney. It hasn’t been an easy build. But if you look at the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge and other iconic projects in Sydney, none of them were easy to complete. If it’s worth doing it’s often very difficult to do, but I’m glad it’s been nearly completed.”
The NSW government has spent $836m on the project. The state also says it will spend another $70m on transport options to the site, including a $30m commuter ferry wharf and $40m for an accessibility upgrade to the Wentworth Park light rail stop.
Jarosch says the market will open when the fit-outs are finished and a “critical mass” of vendors are ready to begin trading.
“We just want to have the right number of retailers, at the right time, to open and make it a success,” he says. “We’re all keen to get in there. I believe we’re going to be making that announcement, just not today.”
There’s no doubt about it, the new fish market is huge. On the ground level, seafood will be carted in by the boatload where a bespoke ice maker the size of a shipping container will help churn out the equivalent of 6,000 bags of ice every day. The public can peer on to the floor of the working wet seafood market through walls of glass, and down into a schmick, classroom-esque auction room where retailers can bid on the morning catch using an app.
Upstairs, a cathedral of seafood awaits. Almost all of the retailers from the old fish market have signed on to move to the new facility. But a slate of new businesses will hawk coffee, flowers and ice-cream while restaurants from Luke Nguyen and Sydney favourites Dirty Red and Touch Wood will be peppered throughout floor space that more than doubles what the old building had on offer.
The market will also double the number of hours it’s open to the public, extending retail trading from 3pm to 10pm.
Eventually the fish market hopes to double visitor numbers and see 6 million people wander through each year.
Anita Mitchell, the chief executive of Placemaking NSW, the body that creates and manages many of Sydney’s iconic harbourside sites, sys there is a “delicate balance” when it comes to an opening date.
“I mean the question on everybody’s lips is, when will it open,” Mitchell says. “Part of the issue is there’s … 40 different retailers all doing their fit-outs concurrently. And there needs to be a critical mass of those retailers to be ready to trade.”
“Nobody wants to open on to a construction site, and everybody wants a critical mass. And nobody wants two buildings.”
