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.
10 of 13 restaurants
Restaurant and bakery
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An organic, ingredient-led restaurant attached to the Fol Epi bakery in the old town, cooking with island farms and its own wood-fired bread. Quiet, serious and good for a long dinner.
Neighbourhood brasserie
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A small French bistro in a former Chinatown schoolhouse with a chalkboard menu of steak frites, mussels and whatever the island's farms and boats brought in that week. A Victoria institution for a proper dinner.
Casual seafood
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Sustainable seafood with a South Indian and French accent — fish curries, tartines and a good chowder — from a small kitchen in downtown Victoria. Casual, colourful and reliably interesting.
Farm-to-table dining room
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A Courtenay restaurant in a heritage house that names the Comox Valley farms, fishers and foragers behind each dish on the menu. The valley's food scene in one room.
Floating patio restaurant
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A Mexican restaurant on a float in Nanaimo's boat basin, all patio and umbrellas, open in the warm months. The most enjoyable lunch on the Nanaimo waterfront, a short walk from the whale-watching offices.
Dockside takeaway
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A shipping container on a wharf in the Inner Harbour serving sustainably sourced fish and chips, tacones and chowder to a queue that forms before it opens. Eat on the dock with the seaplanes landing beside you.
Food truck
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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.
Organic bakery
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A stone-milling organic bakery on the waterfront in Cowichan Bay village, baking with BC-grown heritage grains. The morning stop before a whale trip from the dock across the road.
Small restaurant with harbour views
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A chef-owned restaurant above Sooke Harbour cooking a short, changing menu from the farms, boats and foragers of the Sooke coast. The dinner that turns a West Coast Road day trip into an evening.
Upstairs dining room and bar
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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.