As we have changed. How long gone are those days when half the world signed up for (gastronomic) trends and we stayed watching everything from a distance. If pronouncing and knowing about the existence of certain dishes seemed impossible to us , eating them was already an odyssey that required a monetary investment to take us beyond our borders to test them.
If before we traveled to find what did not reach Spain, now we just need to wait a bit for some restless mind (and with a lot of cultural baggage) to want to make it available to us. Blessed be they and blessed be the times.
Very well off in the world of curing, Spain never saw the need –and did not even need it– to experiment with the smoked ones. It's not that it was easy to try it in big cities either, with a shortage of chimneys with smoke outlets in which to smoke for hours, and even days at a time, without bothering neighbors, being evicted from the community and reaching levels of excellence such as those that our English neighbors –and the distant Americans – they have mastered for years.
Before, long before names like brisket or pastrami began to be heard in restaurants and articles in gastronomic culture magazines, a curious and nostalgic gang under the name of ** Rooftop Smokehouse ** _(Parlament Street, 19) _ , back in 2014, began to recover the flavors and elaborations that they missed from their time in England: those smoked that had never been seen before in Spanish territory.
"We started smoking without really knowing where we were going. It was a hobby, a passion that became true in clandestine dinners and that, little by little, began to sink in," says Carla Rodamilans about the beginning of a project that she started together with her husband Buster Turner.
The interest in smoked products comes from Baxter, who is from London, of the memories of him and his taste for those primary and traditional flavors that he missed.
"It was after we got back from London that we started with the pop-up dinners. The city is a cradle of customs and flavors and we began to miss them. We simply did what we would have liked to find in Barcelona", confesses Carla on the phone.
"The products we started serving at dinners became a reality when we found an attic in Barcelona where we could smoke. That's where the passion for doing what we liked began a bit, changing the atmosphere a bit and even the gastronomic scene that existed in Barcelona", she continues.
It was then that they found a chimney in an old doll factory from 1890 which they converted into their operations center to smoke and assemble dinners in their own space. Since then, they have known how to exploit their potential in gastronomic street food fairs and with an online store where the star product is smoked butter.
"Everyone gets hooked on it because it's cold smoked like our fish. Below 30 degrees. It is a simple product, but essential to accompany with a good sourdough bread, a little cheese and a glass of wine".
Their success grabbed headlines, but they still did not have a physical point of sale where their customers could find, whenever they wanted and at the moment, elaborations like their duck breast, pastrami, bacon, pancetta, salmon, mackerel or octopus.
All of them, of course, smoked, and that are complemented with homemade ferments and pickles such as kimchi, sauerkraut, pickled eggs or gherkins, the average option for meat and fish that spend hours at the mercy of the smoke of the living flame.
"It's not that we were looking to open a store, but we weren't closed to the idea either. In fact, it wasn't difficult to find the location because we didn't come with this business idea, things have always flowed with Rooftop. Baxter and I were in love with a little house in a beautiful corner of Parlament street and we always said: 'Imagine that one day this house is ours'... And we couldn't believe it because the day we saw the 'for rent' sign, that day finally came," recalls Carla.
"When we found the store of our dreams, we said 'why not?'"
A morning walk around the area is worth stopping to say hello to Carla behind the counter (if she isn't touring a market, giving a workshop or touring a hidden corner of Denmark looking for smokehouses to get new ideas from) and ask her , because it is fundamental that you do it, the perfect ingredients for a Sunday brunch: salmon and smoked trout combined with their butter and some low temperature eggs with dill that will taste like glory to you. And to turn it into a carnivorous feast, mix it all up with your bacon and pancetta made in the style of Great Britain.
With the Rooftop Smokehouse and its new delicatessen, there is no doubt : glory is always a pig – and a smoked one – away.