Wright’s Clovelly Road shop, which opened in 1959, was a magnet for chefs and Sydney food lovers.
Terry Wright, who operated his eponymous butcher shop in Randwick for nearly 60 years and pioneered marinades and sauces along the way, has died aged 90.
The Clovelly Road shop, which Wright opened in 1959, was a magnet for chefs and Sydney food lovers, with its owner a local star in an age before butchers hosted food shows and garnered social media status.
Wright gave his customers their first taste of wagyu and Flinders Island lamb and trod on the toes of supermarkets in developing marinades and exotic stuffing because of his dislike of ready-made mixes. Both are now staples in current-day Sydney butcher shops.
Wright, who was inducted into The (Sydney) Magazine Food Hall of Fame in 2005, was a passionate chronicler of societal and retail change. Well into his 80s when he finally hung up the meat cleaver and sold his shop in 2018 (it now operates under a different name), he told the Herald at the time that Sydneysiders had different tastes in meat from when he started out in the 1950s.
He sold a lot more offal back then, and many customers ate meat three meals a day. “You’d find them waiting outside at 6.30 in the morning to get chops for breakfast,” he said.
“When I started out not as many people had cars, so they’d support their local shops more. And there was no competition from supermarkets like there is today,” Wright said when he departed in 2018. “There used to be eight on Clovelly Road, I’m the last one.”
Wright’s son Clayton, who runs a meat wholesaling business with a retail outlet in Alexandria, told the Herald his father passed away following complications from a recent fall.
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Scott Bolles writes the weekly Short Black column in Good Food.
