Old Habits fish sauce from Vancouver Island is true Canadian umami

From a facility on Vancouver Island's Port Alberni, a coastal town where fishing boats dot the inlet visible from his office window, Nathan Gawalko is practising something nearly lost to time: traditional fish sauce fermentation.

It's taken enough time as it is for Nathan to acclimate himself to a slower pace. Five years into running Old Habits—Canada's only fish sauce manufacturer—he admits with a laugh that he still hasn't fully adapted to the waiting game that defines his craft.

"It was great for the first couple of years," he says about trading kitchen chaos for fermentation's languid rhythms. "Then I started to miss it. I don't know what to do with that excess energy."

It's a telling admission from someone who fled the pressure cooker of high-end kitchens across Toronto, Tasmania, and Belgium for what should be fermentation's meditative calm. But it also explains the tension that makes his product compelling: the concentrated intensity of a chef channelled into patient craftsmanship.

Fish, salt, and time: That's it.

Old Habits' process is disarmingly simple: wild-caught local fish, Pacific Northwest sea salt, and time. No additives, no shortcuts, no modernizations of a method that's remained essentially unchanged since the Romans were perfecting it 2,000 years ago. Gawalko isn't reinventing anything here. He's preserving something nearly forgotten.

"I don't have to be on trend and following this chef here who's doing this and that," he explains with an obvious sign of relief. "I can just do this thing and be this craftsman who does this thing that's thousands of years old. It's like a time machine, connecting me to people who did this millennia ago."

The timeline of how Gawalko went from working in a top 100 restaurant in Belgium to producing fish sauce in coastal British Columbia isn't linear. After years bouncing between prestigious kitchens—including one with ex-Garagistes alumni in Hobart, Tasmania and Raymonds in Newfoundland—he found himself facing the industry's uncomfortable truth: kitchens are a young person's game.

"It's like a sport," he says. "You get to a retirement age after a point where you're just not as relevant anymore. You need to shift."

The pivot came while working in Belgium with chef Kobe Desramaults, where they were making a version of fish sauce with herring. The technique clicked. Back in Canada, while working in Newfoundland and weighing options with a colleague headed to Noma's famed fermentation lab, Gawalko remembered the herring experiments.

After confirming nobody in North America was commercially producing traditional fish sauce, he decided to fill the void. Five years later, Old Habits offers an impressive range: four-year aged Spring Roe Herring, three-year Winter Herring, two-year Pacific Pink Shrimp (limited edition), and a special wood barrel-aged batch that hints at Gawalko's ambitions for even longer aging.

A gentle process

In his facility, rows of plastic barrels (plus a handful of custom-made Quercus Cooperage Douglas Fir barrels) contain what begins as what Gawalko calls "organic mulch"—blitzed fish mixed with salt. The salt extracts liquid and ensures food safety, while the enzymes in the fish's guts begin breaking down the flesh.

"That's what makes fish unique," Gawalko explains. "The enzymes allow them to kind of eat themselves. If you did that to a cow, it would just rot."

The process creates something entirely different from the arguably harsher, saltier commercial fish sauces most North Americans know. Old Habits uses less salt than typical producers and ages for much longer, resulting in what Gawalko describes as "a delicate, gentle, subtle product but with a lot of flavour jammed in there."

Counterintuitively, the sauce gets gentler over time, not stronger, mellowing into something you can sip from a spoon "without wrinkling your face up," he says. Each variety carries the distinct character of its source: the winter herring aged three years is more boldly fishy; the roe herring aged for either one year or four years reminiscent of botarga (salted, massaged, pressed, and dried roe pouch, a delicacy in Mediterranean cusine) with an octopus-like quality; and the shrimp being funk-forward with a surprising sweetness.

While fish sauce is typically associated with Southeast Asian cuisines, Gawalko draws inspiration from traditions across Europe and Japan, where regional variations once thrived in every coastal community. He points to Japanese practices of hyper-local production, where specific cities and towns like Oga in the Akita Prefecture and Noto on the Noto Peninsula produce Shottsuru sauce and Ishiri suace, respectively—unique versions available only in nearby shops.

"Fish sauce was once the world's favourite, and the world's most common, condiment," he notes. "It was made in almost every region near to the sea in Europe. From Greece, to Italy to Spain to Iran, as well as in many regions of Japan. It was a product made out of necessity in every fishing port."

The challenges of pioneering this product weren't just technical. Convincing health inspectors to approve fermentation methods thousands of years old but absent from modern Canadian food production required patience and testing, especially for the wood barrel batches.

"It's funny because you have to prove thousands of years of tradition is good versus the last 150 years where plastic's kind of become common," he says. "There's 1900 years of it being fine, though."

On brand

The product's distinctive black and white labels, designed by electronic music artist David Wise, reflect Gawalko's past in film and audio—a refreshingly non-precious aesthetic that feels more underground record label than artisanal food product.

The company name points to the chef's conflicted relationship with leaving kitchen life. "Old habits die hard," he says, admitting he's still trying to find his footing in this slower-paced world. "You can take yourself out the kitchen, but you can't take the kitchen out of yourself, I suppose. While this has all been like this great salvation in my mind, there are times you'll miss the old days and old ways."

As Old Habits enters its next phase, Gawalko is developing additional products while planning for reserve batches aged five years and beyond. He's learning to embrace being a caretaker rather than a creator — or as he puts it, "a shepherd" to a process that mostly requires patience.

For chefs committed to local ingredients, Old Habits provides something previously impossible: truly Canadian umami that speaks to place and tradition. It's a small operation making something remarkable — proof that sometimes the most forward-thinking food producers are the ones looking furthest back.

"It honours thousands of years of tradition," Gawalko says. "There's a charm in that I don't think is a young kid cool guy thing. But as I got older, it became more of an appeal."