F&D Heroes Issue 1

Food & Drink Hero:
The Pished Fish
Inspired by the gravlax flavours from Scandinavia, James is on a mission to
bring the Skandi smokiness to our plates in Britain. From starting his business
in his rickety garden shed, The Pished Fish now has a loyal band of followers
who love this booze-infused fish.
In a previous life I travelled Scandinavia
selling medical devices. This entailed a lot of
hotel stays and smoked salmon and gravlax
for breakfast. Not such a hardship.
I was always fascinated by the flavours that
curing fish could impart, and whilst used to
dill gravlax in the UK, it was the more exotic
flavours I found in Finland and Norway that
truly captured my imagination. As a ‘keen’
home cook I had a go at making gravlax
myself at home, melding and merging as
many weird and wonderful ingredients
together as was possible.
Fast forward a year or so and I was going to
Billingsgate seafood market weekly and buying
what seemed like fairly large quantities of
salmon and trout to fulfil my new found hobby
at home. My hobby was becoming ‘absorbing’
by now as I continued to give much of it away
to friends and family, however increasingly I
noticed that many polite friends and family
were a little wrong-footed by the notion of
raw. In short, they liked smoked salmon but
not gravlax. I found this odd but bowed to my
market no matter how unlucrative they were.
I bought a small home smoker and started
smoking the cured fish in my shed at home.
Suddenly I couldn’t make enough! As soon
as I had smoked the flavoured fish, it seemed
to garner mass appeal. I took it to some
farmer’s markets where we sold loads and
received enough nice comments to make me
think I might be on to something.
Within a year or two we were supplying
Selfridge’s fish, Partridges, Fortnum and
Mason…. I couldn’t really believe it! My wife quit
her job to join the business and off we went,
taking our funny fish up and down the land.
A new baby quickly changed focus from farmer’s
markets at the weekends to retail. This was a
tough transition to make as the joy of meeting
customers and engaging with them was lost.
The business became a wholesale
smoked salmon company, with a little
smokehouse trying to keep up with
the demands of some of our bigger
customers like a certain well-known
online grocer. When their online merger
with ‘you know who’ happened their
business plan changed and overnight
we lost our single largest customer,
suddenly I was wide awake to the
danger of putting too many eggs in
one basket.
Thankfully for us, the way online
shopping has boomed during the
pandemic and has kept us going. It has
allowed me to re-focus on supplying
customers directly, harking back to our
farmer’s market roots. We can get the
brand ethos and values across to the
customers and engage with them in a
way that was traditionally only possible
in a physical space.
Today, our focus is 100% on building
our brand online which allows us to
keep the quality and the handmade
nature of the product in place whilst
letting us experiment with different
flavours (without having to go through
various buying committees before a
product is accepted) returning us to
‘spiritual’ home booze-infused fish.
thepishedfish.com
@thepishedfish
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