Secret Smokehouse began like many fine artisan endeavours: in a garden shed. A decade on from these humble beginnings, its founder Max Bergius has fully revived the art of cold and hot smoking salmon (and trout, haddock, mackerel, mussels and kippers). The convivial Scotsman grew up near Oban, Argyll and Bute: a region famed for its abundance of wonderful seafood (‘langoustine, lobsters, brown crabs, mackerel… all beautifully sweet’). Traipsing up and down the coast, he would see ‘all these little smokehouses, run by old fishermen, one-man bands. They were clamped onto the sides of the houses. There was nothing pretty about it; just fish hanging, wrapped in newspapers’.
At the age of 19, he moved to London, working in marketing and PR for 15 years before a moment of self-realisation saw a return to his father’s home in Loch Awe. Taking some old pallets, he built a makeshift smoker and approached the local fish farm for donations of trout to his DIY cause. ‘The deal they gave me was: “Whatever you smoke, give us half back, and we’ll give it to the lads,”’ says Max. The lads, he confirms, were delighted.
Having returned south once again and bought a house in Stepney, a part of the East End with a rich lineage of smokehouses, Max enrolled in a fishmongering course at Billingsgate Market (‘my filleting was hideously bad’) and began smoking fish in his shed. Then, after successfully hawking his wares to the regulars at his local boozer — ‘like something from the Wild West; you’d go in and all the music would stop’ — the penny finally dropped that he might have a full-time business on his hands.
Six months later, the shed was swapped for a railway arch on Mentmore Terrace in London Fields, E8 — just down the street from Secret Smokehouse’s current, larger unit — as orders ramped up and extra room was needed. Despite starting out with trout, the public’s predilection for salmon won out. ‘Everybody knows salmon,’ Max says with a cheerful shrug. That includes the raft of top-tier chefs and restaurants he now supplies: Wiltons, Claude Bosi, The Fat Duck, Quo Vadis, Nathan Outlaw and The Ritz among them, many gained through word of mouth, as well as employing the genial approach of dropping off sides of salmon to kitchens unannounced and saying: ‘Let me know!’
Brilliant smoked fish, he explains, starts with sourcing. Secret Smokehouse buys high-welfare farmed Scottish salmon (occasionally from technically advanced and super-sustainable land-based fish farms), which is whizzed to London by truck — as opposed to the industrially sea-farmed salmon, air-freighted from Norway or Chile, ubiquitous to cheaper products.
When it arrives at Mentmore Terrace, it is hand-filletted and covered with a dry salt cure, which is left to work its magic for a top-secret amount of time. The fillets are then rinsed and moved to a set of steel units, where they’re smoked with smouldering oak sawdust for another mystery period. (‘All secrets! But it’s a gentle process.’). A slower, cooler smoke avoids the chewy outer layer, or pellicle, you sometimes get with cheaper fish that’s been violently smogged for a swift turnaround. The fillets are then refrigerated, pin-boned by hand and trimmed, before being portioned for shop and online sales or prepared to a client’s requirements. They’re marvellous: firmly textured, subtly fragrant and with an ocean-deep flavour.
The difference between good and bad smoked salmon comes down to the old chestnuts of scale and market economics. Supermarkets favour mechanised production and minimal ingredient costs, whereas artisans such as Max are dogmatic about provenance, hand-processing and producing only limited quantities (about 30 tons of fish a year, he estimates; a supermarket might be more like 250,000).
The artisanal remit extends past mere eating, too. Not only does Secret Smokehouse’s signature product, its ‘London Cure’ salmon, have Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) status — meaning it has been made to traditional metrics within the boroughs of Newham, Hackney or Tower Hamlets — it’s also the world’s only B-Corp certified smokehouse, meeting strict sustainability criteria. The team, too, is tiny; only 12 people do everything.
Despite the skyrocketing demand for his product over the past decade, Max has no desire to expand the business. ‘We’re sticking to our ethos, which is to do one thing well.’
