Taste the Nation: My dad told me if I didn't get a job within a week he’d put me in the army
Anthony Creswell of Ummera Irish Smokehouse
Life came full circle for Anthony Creswell of Ummera Irish Smokehouse in the 1980s. After years of globetrotting and working in the wine industry, Anthony came home to Cork and was drawn to the business his father, Keith, had created in Timoleague.
Ummera can trace its beginnings back to 1962, when Anthony’s parents moved from England to West Cork to start a food business: but it wasn’t smoked salmon that brought them here.
“My father was involved in the chicken business, and he came over to set up an Anglo-Irish chicken franchising operation - I don’t think anyone quite understood what it was all about,” Anthony says.
“My dad got involved in chicken farming a little bit. He was quite a keen fisherman, good at catching a few salmon in the River Bandon, the Argideen and other local rivers and he finally started smoking them and it started from that.”
It was a return to a life he left behind when he left school and went with a friend to Dublin following a career ultimatum.
“I didn't know what to do when I left school: Trinity wouldn’t have me and I didn’t really want to go to Trinity so we had a mutual understanding there,” Anthony jokes.
“One day my dad told me if I didn't get a job within a week he’d put me in the army. A friend was going up to Dublin the next day to work for a wine company so the next day, the two of us got on the train and that was me gone for quite a long time. I was in the wine business in Dublin, France, Germany and eventually Australia.”
Anthony initially returned to Cork to set up a wine shop in Kinsale, but when then-Finance Minister Charles Haughey “upped the duty on wine and doubled it overnight,” Anthony closed his shop and decided to help his dad for a while.
“At that stage my dad was doing smoked salmon and such so I thought I could give him a helping hand. I joined him and we argued and fought for another 15 years.” Keith died in 1999 and Anthony took over the company, moving its location and rethinking its use of wild salmon.
“We built a new smokehouse at Inchy Bridge where I’d built myself a house five years earlier. We started smoking, using wild salmon in those days, but the stocks of wild salmon were getting a little bit unreliable so we started looking at the options. They were just starting to farm organically grown salmon on Cape Clear and in Co Mayo, so we decided to go that way.
“We started buying organically farmed salmon and smoking it - 2006 was the last time we commercially smoked wild salmon. Since then we've been using organic farmed salmon, and it's gone very well for us.”
After realising they could smoke most foods, Anthony included one product that is a nod to his father’s history.
“We also do smoked chicken because my dad was always interested in that, we do a bit of smoked bacon, we do some gravadlax, which is a marinated salmon, and we do smoked duck, smoked beef - you can smoke anything really.” With these new products came awards, and Ummera has an impressive trophy cabinet.
“We've won various awards in the Great Taste Awards and things like that over the years. Last year we got a three-star Gold Award and we got the Golden Fork for the Best Irish Produce at the Great Taste Awards, that was great.”
Ummera supplies shops and hospitality as well as catering to individual customers, shipping to buyers all over the world.
“We’ve remained small because we've been concentrating on quality rather than quantity. we're supplying speciality food shops, food restaurants, hotels and quite a lot of private people ordering online. We are shipping all around the world. Yesterday, I sent some smoked salmon off to Canada and another one went off to Hong Kong.”
Naturally, Brexit has been a thorn in their side but Anthony is optimistic that they can ensure their smoked salmon features on as many tables this Christmas as possible.
“At the moment we're caught with Brexit problems for shipping into the UK. That has become a bit of a nightmare. Hopefully we'll get around it. We do quite a lot of shipping at Christmas time because everyone wants smoked salmon on Christmas Day all over the world. We are small, we're fairly exclusive and very specialised.”
Many customers order online but Anthony says anyone passing their way is always welcome to call in.
“We're always happy to have visitors to the smokehouse, we're more than happy to see people. Over the last couple of years it's been, naturally, fairly quiet but we've had a few tour groups come round. We don't really get people passing by but people know where we are. They can come in and buy if they want or they can look around and have a chat.”
