Cyril R. Fitzsimons, an Irish barkeep whose duneside roadhouse on the Napeague stretch lives on in memory as an emblem of carefree summers past — when the rum flowed and sunburned people sang along to the sweet pulse of a steel-pan band — died on April 24 from complications of Covid-19. He was 77 and had reportedly been a patient at the Triboro Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing in the Bronx following a stroke in March.
For a quarter-century, Mr. Fitzsimons’s popular establishment brought post-beach traffic to a crawl on Montauk Highway, near the Walking Dunes, on late Saturday and Sunday summer afternoons. All through the 1990s and 2000s, cars lined the roadway for a quarter-mile in either direction, and customers spilled out of the brightly painted shanty that was Cyril’s Fish House, balancing paper plates of fried flounder sandwiches in one hand and a frosty blender drink in the other as the sun went down and the reggae music came up.
The mustachioed Mr. Fitzsimons was a local icon of the barefoot, Jimmy Buffet lifestyle, greeting customers as they arrived (under the gaze of a giant mounted blue marlin) in his oversize eyeglasses and panama hat, with his gold teeth, Marlboro cigarettes, and — in the early years, anyway — South Seas sarong. By the entrance, a sign summed up the esprit de corps: “Cyril’s . . . A Sunny Place for Shady People.”
Mr. Fitzsimons and his business partners opened the restaurant and bar with little fanfare in July 1990. Last call came in 2016, after a protracted public controversy over its liquor license and parking issues, and a court battle over code violations. Through all the legal wrangling, a faithful legion of patrons rallied to the side of Mr. Fitzsimons and his libertarian-with-libations cause of live and let drink. A trial in 2016 ended with a guilty verdict on multiple misdemeanor charges — and the shuttering of the house that Cyril built.
At its height, the salty joint generated actual bagsful of cash (as became apparent when, in 2013, two satchels containing more than $27,000 were stolen from Mr. Fitzsimons’s house on Windmill Lane, Amagansett, following a typically busy late-June weekend). The signature drink and major moneymaker at Cyril’s was a B.B.C. — for Bailey’s Irish Cream (B), banana (B), and “colada” (C). “No one in the U.S. sells as much Irish Cream as we do,” Mr. Fitzsimons told a reporter from The Irish Times in 2012. He was an inveterate sun-chaser, heading south after Columbus Day weekend each year to the British Virgin Island of Anguilla, where for a time he dispensed B.B.C.s at a southern outpost of Cyril’s Fish House, and at a hot spot called Zara’s in Shoal Bay.
He was born on July 25, 1943, in Ireland and came to the United States as a young man of 19 or 20 (accounts differ). He told a reporter in 2014 that he had grown up in a small town outside of Dublin, one of six children in a prosperous household, and that his early work life had been varied and adventurous, featuring a stint as a wrangler at an upstate New York dude ranch and entanglements with the Irish Republican Army in Dublin the 1970s.
In the winter of 1966-67, according to a chapter about him in “Why Marines Fight” by James Brady, he served as a rifleman with the U.S. Marines in Vietnam; a little later, first as a corporal and soon as a buck sergeant, he commanded a detachment of a “combined action company,” part Marine Corps men and part local soldiers, in the hills overlooking the Tam Ky River. “What we did was go on patrols during the day and set up ambushes by night,” he told Mr. Brady. He served until 1971 — as his framed dispatch papers, hung on the photo-and-souvenir-crowded wall of Cyril’s Fish House, attested.
Before finding his home and his following at Cyril’s Fish House, Mr. Fitzsimons ran a couple of bars in Manhattan, including one called Eamon Doran’s — named for its co-owner, another famous expatriate Irish publican — on Second Avenue.
Mr. Fitzsimons is survived by his longtime partner, Prudence Thomas, and two children, Richard Fitzsimons and Kimani Thomas-Fitzsimons, all of New York City. Two brothers and a sister also survive, in Dublin.