Restaurant Owner Links Emerald Isle With Hamptons Seafood

Cyril Fitzsimons holds court at a table in his restaurant one weekday afternoon as a string of employees and visitors walk over, sit down and consult with him about one item or another.

All the while, the restaurant owner takes sips from a nearby water bottle and snatches a few minutes to read from a James Patterson paperback about four married women on a vacation that goes terribly wrong. It seems that with his recent troubles with East Hampton Town, Fitzsimons can appreciate that feeling when plans don't go exactly the way you expect.

Fitzsimons talks in a distinctive Irish brogue about some recent troubles (he said he had money stolen from him) as well as problems in the beginning of the season that threatened to close his bar temporarily.

For 22 years, Cyril's Fish House has been a popular party spot and seafood joint in Amagansett ever since Fitzsimons came out from Manhattan to open up along a stretch of Route 27 leading to Montauk.

Before that, Fitzsimons was just a young man from Dublin who came over to America to join the Marines in 1965. He says he did a stint in the Corps, then returned to Ireland but ended up back in the United States in the 1970s. He now splits his time between his East End home and a place on a small island in the Caribbean where he also owns a bar in the off season.

His Amagansett restaurant is packed with memorabilia about, well, Cyril Fitzsimons. Pictures of Fitzsimons with various people line one hallways and the restaurant is decorated with various objects. Blown glass sculptures hang from the ceiling, a Marine poster sits above the ATM (Cyril's Fish House is cash-only) and there's a vibrant painting hanging on the side deck of a Cyril-looking figure in three different poses. A Cyril triptych, if you will.

One picture that stands out among the others is not of Fitzsimons himself but is a framed photograph of a great white shark, giant hook in its snout, signed "To Cyril, Capt. Frank Mundus." Mundus was the Montauk shark fisherman with a colorful personality who is said to have inspired the character of Quint in the movie and novel versions of "Jaws" by Peter Benchley. Fitzsimons himself has an outsized personality to match Mundus and when asked to pose for a picture, he gladly obliges, saying every weekend he's asked to take hundreds of snapshots with patrons.

Both Mundus and Fitzsimons have reputations that precede them on the East End and both would probably claim that they are just misunderstood.

Despite his troubles, Fitzsimons laughs easily, smiles often and talks freely about himself and his dealings with the town when approached at his table on a hazy afternoon in June.

When asked for an official quote he says, "Tell them I've had a week from hell."