A new smokery has opened in Ipswich, after a wedding catering company reinvented itself during the coronavirus lockdown.
Until this year Ian Dickson and Andrew Ward worked as wedding caterers, usually doing around 150 weddings a year.
When the country went into lockdown back in March the pair were left with no income and time on their hands.
As events catering was no longer an option they started Smoke House Kitchen on Woodbridge Road in Ipswich.
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Mr Dickson said: “We had to reinvent ourselves in another way otherwise the business would have had to close and we would have just gone home. But we were up for a fight so we’ve tried to do this and it seems to be working quite well.
“For the last two years, we’d been doing a little bit of smoking, but just for our own tables.
“Never anything serious, because we didn’t have the time or the energy to get stuck into it properly. But when lockdown started I invested in a couple of commercial smokers.
“We started to experiment for maybe two and a half months until we felt we were happy with the products so we gave them out to friends and family for some feedback.
“And then in the in the middle of August, we opened up to sell to the public.
“It’s gone really quite well ever since.”
But this is not the first time Mr Dickson has had to reinvent himself.
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Before the financial crash of 2008 he had worked as a project manager for the Ministry of Defence, but after being made redundant he started up as a wedding caterer.
Now, the pair are smoking everything from cheese to chicken wings over a mix of oak and mesquite wood – preferring Suffolk produce wherever possible.
Mr Dickson said they pride themselves on their delicate smokey flavour which allows the flavour of the food “as it was meant by the producer” to shine through.
In the run up to Christmas the Smoke House Kitchen is launching festive products including smoked Suffolk hams and smoked Suffolk turkey crowns.
You can find more information about the Smoke House here.
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