The Story of Neopol Savory Smokery

Dorian Brown
Co-Owner, Neopol Savory Smokery
3210 Grace Street NW

Months before he was born, Dorian Brown’s mother had an intense craving for smoked fish.

Barbara emigrated from Germany to Baltimore the year prior, and had developed an affinity for the cured seafood during frequent trips to Scandinavia. When she couldn’t find any in Baltimore, she started smoking her own salmon in the backyard. Eventually, she started selling it at the local farmer’s market.

‘She was selling smoked game bird like peasants and Cornish game hens, and salmon was secondary, but people wanted salmon, and the business grew in that direction,’ Dorian says. ‘I was four or five and I’d go with her and sell lemonade while she smoked fish.’

In the late 80s, very few farmer’s market vendors were offering prepared foods. Dorian says they weren’t met with open arms—many farmers understandably worried they were going to take over the market—but their unconventional approach drew business.

‘My mom was an OG with prepared foods. You had all these sturdy and official-looking farmer’s stands, and my mom had these card tables and some table cloths from the house. She has a big personality and a thick accent, and she’d wear velvet tights. Here was this German lady, and my Godmother—a short black lady, and me running around with lemonade. We definitely stood out! But at the very least it was interesting, and demand steadily grew.’

One farmer’s market turned into two, then three. After 10 years on the circuit, Barbara was given the opportunity to open a brick and mortar store in Baltimore. Dorian was heading to college in the fall, and helped his mom set up Neopol Savory Smokery at the Belvedere Square location before he left.

By the time he graduated four years later, Barbara was exhausted.

‘She’d been working my entire life and this store was a seven days a week, non-stop thing. She was thinking maybe this isn’t what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. I’d always worked there on weekends, holidays, and during the summer, but I came back after graduation and told her I’d put in a full year. That turned into two years, which turned into a lifetime.’

Dorian and Barbara became official business partners in 2009, opening a second location in Union Market a few years later. When commercial real estate owners Jessica and Ezra Glass asked them to open a Georgetown outpost on Grace Street, Dorian says the offer was tempting, if not untimely.

‘They’re wonderful people who really love Georgetown and are invested in its future, and they came to Baltimore and told us to think about it. We loved the space, and we always loved Georgetown. My mom worked a million jobs when I was growing up, and we made a point to make the most of our mother son time when we had it, and we’d hop in the car and drive down to Georgetown. It reminded my mom of Europe, and we’d go and split this delicious roast beef sandwich at Dean & DeLuca. I enjoyed the vibe since I was a kid, but we had our hands full and weren’t in a position to expand.’

After two years of courting, Jessica and Ezra convinced them otherwise—opening a Georgetown location in October 2018.

Today, Dorian splits his time between Baltimore and DC, manning everything from the counter, to the books, to the kitchen with Barbara. They’ve worked with the same Scottish and Norwegian distributors since the beginning, and go through nearly 1,000 pounds of wild salmon a week between the three locations.

Dorian says one of the most popular fish in the world is also one of the trickiest; as much bad salmon on the market as there is quality. Now more than ever, customers want to know what they’re eating.

‘In the early 90s, there were so many stories about salmon farming practices that were terrible. It really shook people up, and they paid more attention to it. I look at reports on fish all the time, and we’re very careful about where we’re getting it. It’s also hard to have a business centered on a product that fluctuates so much in price, because we can’t change the cost of the salmon BLT every day, so we have to find a middle ground.’

Neopol also offers smoked meat, shrimp and salads, but salmon is the star of the show. Smoking it is more an art than a science; Dorian forgetting the last time he used a thermometer on the fish. It’s done when it’s done, he says—he just knows.

Passion plays a part, too.

‘If you’re inviting people over to your house to eat, you’re going to think about what you’re making. Whatever that feeling is, that passion, that’s the feeling we have when we’re making the food.’

Working with mom only enhances the love behind the food. Dorian enjoys being in business with family, though he’s had to establish more boundaries in recent years.

‘I’m 36 years old, and I think no matter how old you are, moms still think of their sons as children. That’s fine in most relationships, but when it’s your actual business partner, sometimes you need to hone it in. When you’re talking to someone on a business call and you have to say, ‘Wait for my mom to get in on this call,’ it kind of takes away your credibility a little bit. I’ve started calling her Barbara at work. Outside of that, she’s my mom. But she’s always my mom, and she’s wonderful. She’s worked harder than anybody I’ve ever met in my entire life.’

They’ve both worked incredibly hard to get where they are today, and with so much growth in the past year, Dorian is hesitant to expand further at the moment. They’ve been warned about the cost of growing too big, and losing a relationship with their staff.

Dorian isn’t ruling out another location in the future, but he also knows the importance of reconnecting with where they can from.

‘I met a new, 17-year-old employee at one of the stores and he didn’t know we started at farmer’s markets. To me, you’ve gotta know our whole story, and you should tell people that. We need to get back to that a little.’