Our Journey
Island raised.
I grew up in my family’s fish plant, Walcan Seafood, on Quadra Island along BC’s inside coast. Technically I grew up in the house 100 meters up the hill from the fish plant, but there was no property boundary in my mind. Every time my mom took her eye off me I raced down the hill, with or without shoes - sometimes without clothes altogether. It was a wonderful playground for my two brothers and me where we would play on the dock, hide in the net loft, and harvest pops from the cupboards and stash them in crevices in the surrounding bluffs, all the while fueled on sugar cubes we grazed from the lunch room.
We spent every summer working there. My first shift of work was at the ripe age of six years old. I received $2 per hour to essentially make a mess. My task was to place a salt pellet in every can of salmon before the salmon was added. My dad gave me a quick demo then left me to it with a lidded tote full of empty cans. I could reach all of the outermost cans, but I was too short to reach any rows closer to the center of the tote. My solution was to just grab handfuls of salt pellets and throw them into the air in the general direction of the remaining empty cans. Some got lots of salt, some got none.
As the years went on I became less of a liability and more of an asset. I spent years working on the salmon roe crew making sujiko and caviar with egg maven Sue Brereton, Mr. Usui and Kazunari san. I spent plenty of time on the slime line and plenty more on the case up crews. Ironically, given my eventual career as a chef, I never worked on the fillet crew.
urban trained.
It wasn’t until a short stint working in a Lebanese fish plant while living in Montreal that I filleted my first salmon under the tutelage of Sabur, a former Afghan veterinary surgeon who wound up butchering fish when he moved to Canada. It was in Montreal that I also worked in my first kitchen. I had long been interested and intimidated by restaurant kitchens (both in credit to Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential), but my time cooking in Racha Bassoul’s kitchen, Le Bazaar, was anything but intimidating. She and everyone who worked there were warm and generous people. Family meal was shared before every service and her refined Lebanese cuisine was intoxicating.
Upon moving back to Vancouver in 2008, I immediately started volunteering at the UBC farm. The first person I met was the sous chef at Bishop’s Restaurant, where Chef Andrea Carlson was then in charge. He told me to come in for a working stage. I surely underwhelmed the whole kitchen when I cut the tips of two fingers off while slicing fingerling potatoes on the mandolin. This was bad enough in and of itself, but then I started to pass out and they had to pause service to escort me outside. For some reason she still hired me and shortly after convinced me to enroll at NorthWest Culinary Academy, where I came out top in my class just in time to land a job working under Chef Hamid Salimian as he opened The Apron at The Westin Wall Center in Richmond. It’s quite possible that no one outside of my immediate family has influenced me more than Chef Hamid - he is one of the most complex people I’ve ever known; deeply kind and loyal at his core, occasionally fierce at his surface (at least back then). He has immense skill and talent and keeps a very high standard. He pushed everyone to excel, but it came from a place of caring. I became a better cook without a doubt, but I also became a better person in the long run as he was never afraid to call out an ego whenever it appeared, but then left individuals to decide whether or not to deal with them. Through those years I shed a lot of ego that I hadn’t even been aware of and probably still wouldn’t. He was a competition chef and, as his apprentices, we became competition cooks. Through my apprenticeship I cooked in local, national and international competitions from small regional gigs to the Culinary Olympics in Erfurt, Germany. Sometimes I won, but I always learned a lot.
Education Focused.
I went on to work with amazing chefs from Mexico to Thailand to Korea and spent some time as a health-focused personal chef and a restaurant consultant, but my focus throughout all of this was always on education. I volunteered at the non-profit Project CHEF for 5 years before leaving restaurants altogether to join the team full time in 2014.
Project CHEF was conceived of and is run by the incomparable force that is Barb Finley, who has recently been inducted into the BC Restaurant Hall of Fame and won the Governor General of Canada’s Meritorious Service Award for her work at Project CHEF teaching food (and life) skills to Vancouver public elementary students. The hands-on program teaches children and families about healthy cooking and eating, from prepping to cleaning up and dining together. I was fortunate to be part of the team for three and a half years; long enough to teach several thousand kids from ages 5 to 12 how to feed themselves, where their food comes from, what good food means and how to enjoy preparing meals and dining as a family. Never have I seen a program more effective in its delivery. No words were ever wasted; the lessons were articulate, focused and they got lasting results. It is directly responsible for improving thousands of lives by fostering healthy lifestyle habits for both kids and their parents.
Moving home — A Return to roots, Community & Cooking.
I loved working at Project CHEF but my wife Katie and I always intended to move back to Quadra Island one day and while she had a perfectly transferable career as a Naturopathic Doctor, I had far fewer options in the food industry. In 2017, I made a practical career-change to become an electrician. I enrolled at BCIT, worked one enjoyable year in Vancouver and one more on Quadra after we returned home in 2018. It was a good job and I assumed I would stick with it for a long time; I was wrong.
In the fall of 2019 I entered the NexStream startup business challenge based on a friend’s recommendation after they heard about my increasingly complicated home fermentation experiments. I had no ambitions to start a business but thought it would be an interesting learning experience. Through the mentorship of the considerably competent panel of NexStream advisers my fermentation project quickly gained the focussed objective to add value to wasted food - specifically wasted seafood from Walcan. My family’s fish plant was full of high quality, potentially delicious byproducts. The fish plant once again became my playground and momentum built up quickly. All of my past experiences in the food and fish businesses came together and in February of 2020 WildIsle Ferments was born. By July we had proven market viability of three different fish sauces. In September of that year I was announced the winner of the first annual NexStream competition, resulting in a $50,000 cash infusion for WildIsle and my official transition back into the world of food.
— Chef Brandon Pirie, WildIsle Ferments
WildIsle emerged from an interest in fermenting,
And Grew to a community collaboration with family & friends.
An idea to celebrate fermented food grew into a collaboration with local seafood processor, Walcan Seafood,
to better utilize their by-products, which have incredible nutritional and flavour potentials.
Brandon Pirie, WildIsle Ferments on Quadra Island, B.C. is the winner of NexStream 1.0 Tech Competition 2020 in the Wildcard Challenge.