How Rooftop Smokehouse Brought Smoky, Meaty Mayhem to Barcelona

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How Rooftop Smokehouse Brought Smoky, Meaty Mayhem to Barcelona

Hint: They nearly got evicted.

Stepping into the Rooftop Smokehouse in Barcelona's Eixample district is a bit like being transported into another dimension. Or at least, transported to a different city. The heady scent of smoke evokes images of trees, of wood burning in a cold climate—a peculiar odor you don't come across much in the Catalan capital.

The streets of Barcelona throw many scents one's way. Those spongy, sweet ghosts of freshly baked baguettes escaping from the many bakeries; the wonderfully pungent clouds of garlic and seafood riding the wind above the sun drenched streets; and here and there—BAM!—a familiar good ol' waft of sewage from the city's pipes. That's what Barcelona smells like: sea, salt, sun, wonderful Mediterranean food, and a dash of mierda.

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When those are the scents you're used to, it's no wonder you go a bit Patrick Süskind when entering the Rooftop Smokehouse, because its woody spirit evokes things far away from Barcelona.

Rooftop Smokehouse is a wonderland of smoky meats and fish paired with sharp, crunchy, punchy condiments. They smoke everything from mackerel and pastrami to octopus, eels, ducks, papadas, homemade English bacon, and even whole pigs. They make their own pickles and fermented products, their own mustard and beer, hold workshops, and sell their goods to a range of delicatessens and restaurants, apart from, of course, the dinners they organise in the restaurant.

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Rooftop Smokehouse makes its own pickles and fermented products. All photos by Iris Humm.

It's worth noting their type of smoking is different from American barbecue—they're not covering meats with syrups, rubs, and sugar. It's closer to nordic cuisine, more about lightly curing and sweetly smoking.

Now married with one child, Carla Rodamilans and Buster Turner met in London. Carla, originally from Lleida in Catalonia, worked as a fashion designer and Buster, a Londoner, as a photographer (and among other things, as a babysitter for chef legends Fergus and Margot Henderson's kids).

After Carla got a work offer in Barcelona, the couple moved there in 2007. Buster was unable to find work as a photographer and took a job as a bicycle tour guide. On his daily tours, he went past the cooking school Hofmann until one day he decided to enroll. There he got a serious chef education, yet realised he wanted to do something wildly different from French classic cuisine. It's also where he met Jakob Zeller, a core member of the smokehouse team.

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Although Barcelona is widely regarded as a culinary gem, there were many things that Buster and Carla missed from London.

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Buster Turner with ducks ready for smoking.

"Barcelona is a very gastronomic place," Carla explains, "but we were really disappointed every time a new place opened up. It would always be super beautifully done, but every time, we would be able to guess the menu without even looking at it. The same tapas story, every time."

"Yep—croquettas, patatas bravas, olives," Buster continues. "The same things—but just with different decoration. Like, come on, guys."

So Carla and Buster started doing the food they felt nostalgic about, through their pop-up gastropub Horse and Heron. They invited friends, modelling the dinners on their favourite food from London, recreating the atmosphere of a cozy pub, with lots of booze and a casual atmosphere—and serious attention to the food.

When they started to investigate smoked foods to serve at the pop-up, Buster became slightly obsessed. "He could not bear the thought that he wouldn't smoke the food himself," Carla remembers.

"We had smoked mackerel pate on the menu, and we were buying smoked mackerel to make it. And we really felt we should be doing it ourselves! That's when we started doing this," Buster says and points toward the Priorat wine barrel they turned into a smoker. "We were literally building that, for one dish in a pop-up menu, on our rooftop."

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Smoked mackerel. The line outside the pop-up at Rooftop Smokehouse's current location.

Their rooftop smoking operations grew organically until, Buster says, "it got to the point where our neighbours got really pissed off about the smoke in our house, after a year of smoking in there with a barrel. We had chainsaws up there, we were chopping wood, making beer—it was a complete laboratory."

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"We also ordered a ton of wood," Carla says, "and the delivery guys would just dump it on the street."

During one wild weekend of pop-ups on their rooftop, they had 40 guests over for lunch on Saturday and 40 for dinner on Sunday. There were thunderstorms in the weather forecast and Buster and Carla had been dragging furniture around, getting the barbecue going, and trying to protect the whole terrace from rain.

"Fifteen minutes before the guests are due," Carla says, "two neighbours knock on our door saying, 'You've been bothering us since seven in the morning. What the fuck are you doing? We're calling the police!'"

Buster and Carla bluffed, saying that the whole thing was actually a baptism party for their daughter. That didn't go down well.

"They said they weren't going to take any more bullshit from us, and that they were calling the police. That was a warning. Then we didn't hear anything between that and the eviction letter, so we thought they forgot—that we were actually fine."

The party was, despite the drama, a success. People got drunk and happy, and the pig turned out wonderfully. While the neighbours were getting increasingly upset about smelling smoked meat, listening to chainsaws, and stepping over dumped wood, the Rooftop Smokehouse team were blissfully unaware, and started gearing up to sell their popular products at the food truck event Van Van Market during La Mercè in 2014.

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"When the market was seven days away," Carla says, "we went home and found a letter under the door from the landlord. It said she knew everything, that she got in touch with her lawyers, and that we had five days to get rid of all the illegal activity. She said she had seen fire, smoke, sparks, that we had an 'illegal kitchen' on our terrace. We just thought, oh my god…"

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Inside the new space.

The food truck event was broadcast on live TV, with the team happily proclaiming, "We're Rooftop Smokehouse, and we started in our terrace!"

"As we went home, we thought we were practically evicted. It was a really distressing," Carla says.

"We also just had a newborn kid then, and were about to be evicted," Buster adds.

It came to a point when the pair decided to "invest or die" as they put it, to make their smoking operation legal once and for all.

Now, the Rooftop Smokehouse is located in the beautiful Fábrica Lehmann and it's impossible to miss the majestic chimney towering over their smoky abode, 30 metres tall.

Many people told them that they would never be able to start smoking food there, and the team, who didn't know anything about fume extraction, had to fight for a long time and jump through many bureaucratic hoops before they could finally do it.

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The Rooftop Smokehouse team.

"And when we saw the chimney smoking for the first time… oh, goood!" Carla says, putting her hands across her face as the memory of joy overwhelms her.

"It all could have gone horribly wrong," says Buster, "but it kinda worked out, and we never planned to make make a business out of it. It was for fun, and it still feels like it's for fun. It's weird when we now have a lawyer, we have employees—it's quite weird the concept of having people working for it, chipping in. And it still feels like that, and there are moments where it's like, 'Oh, yeah, people have to go on holiday. They can't just stay here forever."

He laughs and adds, "We're getting our heads around that."

"What is really beautiful is that we've been evolving but keeping the same principle as the first ever public event. Now we still sell these products, in restaurants, in Michelin-starred restaurants, in delicatessen shops, but now it's all legal. We've been evolving the idea, but we've been making it stronger and wider," Carla says.

Finally, the Rooftop Smokehouse can smoke in peace, and their old neighbours can live in peace, too, without the smoke.