April 2025

Me just back from a month in France Robin and I spent two days and nights here debriefing. This food review will include the accommodation.

The harbour house built in around 1920 was a family home, taken over by restauranteurs in the 1970s and run as a localvore high-class eatery featuring BC wines. That ethos of course has faded through the 2000s and the whole show needed a facelift. The hotel and restaurant has changed hands and been renovated in the last couple of years, now feeling like it’s looking for Michelin stars.

We stayed here I think about 30 years ago (Robin would say more recently) with my brother and his wife and found it wonderful, rustic, and unaffected. I remember discussing with the wine guy good quality BC wines which I really liked. What a surprise: good wine actually produced on Vancouver Island, waking me up to local wine for the first time. The room was cozy and I think had a hot tub and we went away impressed and happy, although we could have done without the then-trendy insistence on food available only in a 100 mile radius of the kitchen.

This time we had booked their “epicurean package” which included two nights, one five-course special dinner and two breakfasts at approximately C$1750 plus drinks, tax and tips.

So, to comment on the big dinner last night. It started with a gazpacho, surprisingly watery with its chopped tomato cucumber and bell pepper. Then escargot with garlic butter, parsley mushrooms and Swiss cheese. This was as expected from the ingredients minus the garlic which I couldn’t taste.

A coho salmon sashimi was three strips of fish with dressing and a “soy and mirin reduction”  and various vegetables as well. I don’t quite know what to say about this course except that the salmon seemed less than fresh and there was the overall blunting of flavour that by this time looked like business as usual for the kitchen.

The main was braised beef short rib. The meat was beautifully tender, for sure the high point of the dinner, reasonably tasty and falling off the bone which had disappeared. There was a pasty polenta, cooked leek, and a wine reduction. Finally a “chocolate tart” that was a rectangular solid block of soft sweet chocolate fripperied up with a couple of additional chocolate pieces.

Wine is handled strangely. The online list runs to about a dozen bottles, but then there is a second longer list presented at the table of wines by the glass, a third one of wines subject to “Half-price Wednesday” (which it happened to be), a further list appearing to include everything available, and then a visible wine storage case with similar but not identical products. A pinot noir called Quail Gate Stewart Family which retails for $57 was listed on the menu at $150. There was also Meyer Okanagan pinot noir which we know retails for $24 offered at $80. The Quail Gate at its half listed price looked like a bargain. While it had some pinot noir character it was coarse and unbalanced toward acid and tannin in the mouth making it a so-so restaurant value at $75. At full price most wine here is marked up by about 200%. Of the two bottles (another was a Sardinian white) we’ve tasted neither deserves to be on a serious restaurant list and isn’t worth the regular price.

Overall this dinner with its tiresomely studied descriptions continues the characteristics of the place and its dominant feel: superficial high luxury class without much depth, and very high prices. Although there were quite a few cars in the parking lot and maybe 20 people at dinner, this morning ours was one of two cars so we were in scant company overnight.

The staff are numerous and variable in experience and skill. A lovely front desk lady was solicitous and charming but restaurant staff were hesitant, sometimes cheery but often resentful and focused on unreasonable rules, and unfamiliar with anything like the style of hospitality and food this place is obviously reaching for. We got into an argument when we were leaving over what to include in our “package”, and were patronized and angrily dismissed.

The previous morning we had respectable fancied-up eggs Benedict with overcooked yolks. A long walk along the rock and gravel spit in front of the hotel was bracing and helped burn a few of the breakfast calories.

There is a bakery which is a separate enterprise off the main building with very high-class morning vennoiserie and excellent bread that appears on the table in the restaurant. Local people come here to buy the products I believe. The only thing this facility shared with the rest of the hotel was a surly no-eye-contact attitude.

Our opinion of the new Harbour House is that it’s rough around the edges, puts out technology-institute food pitched as luxury haute cuisine that’s brazenly overpriced, and that there must be some serious trouble with management and maybe finances to explain our overall disappointment. Too bad because the building is beautiful, the locale and views first-rate, and there’s a history of warmth and professionalism in the past. Now we don’t think it’s worth the hike even from Victoria to be disappointed, treated like you’ve made a mistake, and overcharged.

For the restaurant: food 7.2, service on average 6.5, ambience 9.3, value 6.8, peace and quiet 9.0 because there was practically nobody around.