Editorial picks, not sponsored
13 places chosen for being distinct rather than for being everything: dockside fish, farm-to-table rooms in the Cowichan Valley, Tofino kitchens and a few serious Victoria dining rooms. Filter by where you are staying and what the evening is for.
3 of 13 restaurants
Fine dining with rooms
$$$$
A chef-owned restaurant in Ucluelet with a small tasting-menu dining room and a handful of guest rooms above it, cooking the coast's seafood and foraged ingredients with real ambition. The reason to eat in Ucluelet rather than drive to Tofino.
Food truck
$$$$
The orange taco truck in a surf-shop parking lot on the Pacific Rim Highway that grew into a Vancouver restaurant group. Fish tacos, burritos and a chocolate-diablo cookie, eaten on a picnic table after the beach.
Upstairs dining room and bar
$$$$
Tofino's best-known dinner: a two-storey room above the harbour with a menu built around what the coast provides — cedar, seaweed, wild fish, foraged greens — and a bar that takes cocktails as seriously as the kitchen takes fish.