VICTORIA’S RESTAURANT RESET: Old faces, new places in BC's dining capital
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Victoria's restaurant scene is exciting — from revitalized favourites to new hot spots, thanks to experienced chefs from near and far
Words and Photos
By CINDA CHAVICH
The buzz is palpable as the dinner crowd gathers at Café Brio on a Saturday night.
From the warm welcome and familiar decor to the seasoned staff and creative local menu, it’s vintage Victoria dining, the kind of place that put our small city on the culinary map when it first opened nearly 30 years ago.
It’s no secret that Victoria’s independent restaurants have faced challenges in recent years — from shortages of skilled workers to high rents and skyrocketing food costs — yet despite some setbacks and closures, they forge ahead. Whether it’s new owners taking on established properties or chefs creating new concepts, there’s a delicious buzz building in the hospitality business around town.
And like a game of musical dining chairs, local chefs and culinary professionals have shifted positions, with some of your favourite talents finding new roles inside and outside the kitchen.
RELOVED, REIMAGINED
The quiet but significant reshuffling of stewardship at two of the city’s most influential “legacy” dining rooms, Café Brio and Brasserie L’Ecole, is the perfect example of this evolution.
Partners chef Samuel Harris and barman Vincent Vanderheide now own and operate both restaurants, under their Vinuel Restaurant Group (a portmanteau of their first names).
It was serendipity that led the longtime colleagues and friends into the world of restaurant ownership. When Harris — a chef known for launching such acclaimed restaurants as The Courtney Room, Agrius and Boom + Batten — applied for the chef’s position at Café Brio in
2022, former owner Greg Hays was keen to retire.
Hays not only hired Harris and Vanderheide, he sold them the business.
“So, I got the chef spot first and I lured Vinnie in,” says Harris. “Like-minded people come together, right? That’s how it works.”
While Harris admits he likes “projects” — and the challenge of opening new restaurants — the idea of owning a business that embodied their shared love of local food and hospitality just clicked. The pair slid right into the operation, keeping the skilled servers and local suppliers, and Café Brio flourished, with the same food and ambiance beloved by a loyal clientele.
When the opportunity arose to buy the popular, but struggling, Brasserie l’Ecole, they had established a track record and their bankers were on board.
“We've felt confident that we could take our formula — keep all of the staff, invest some of our resources and invest our time to get our systems into place — to turn it around,” Harris says. “We kept the product the same, but we changed the model, making it easier for people to access reservations, with more servers in the room. We just plan to be busy.”
Their years of experience, working for larger companies, helped the partners develop solid systems to track food and beverage costs, and manage the razor thin margins notorious in the restaurant business.
So far, it’s worked, earning them enough capital to launch their own new venture, Dough Eyes, an artisan New York-style pizza and gelato shop, set in the former location of vegan pizza franchise Virtuous Pie.
It’s just one of the new city eateries in the planning and construction phase now.
IT’S A SMALL WORLD
Victoria has more restaurants per capita than any other city — some 4.6 eateries per 1,000 residents. As part of the city’s tourism sector, food service is a big economic driver, with independent restaurants supporting island farmers and fishers, helping to sustain local food systems.
Still, there’s constant churn in the restaurant business, and it’s harder than ever for restaurateurs to make sense of the numbers. Even with strong customer support, several popular spots, including Saveur, Chorizo & Co. and Little Jumbo, have closed their doors.
Clark Deutscher, chef-owner of Hanks, Nowhere, Ate and Somewhere, sold Hanks and shuttered the rest of his popular eateries last year. Unicorn Sparkles (named by his young daughter) is now his only operation, reimagined in the old Nowhere space, and the one place where Deutcher’s fans can still enjoy the hyper-local menus that change at the whim of this creative cook.
“It kind of has the vibes of the original Hanks, back in the day, a little louder, rough around the edges, but the food is fairly refined,” says Deutscher who continues to source ingredients from small local farms, break down whole animals and mill his own flour, a formula he says keeps his prices down.
The elaborate multi-course menus are gone, but whether it’s his house made pasta (think mortadella carbonara or agnolotti with beef shin ragout), giant burgers, pizzas or steak, creativity rules. And, in his typically irreverent fashion, Deutscher turns out a bargain “Cheap Shit” menu every week, where you can try his house-made pastrami sandwich or Beef Cheek and Black Bean Fried Rice with a $5 cocktail.
It’s a distillation of his former restaurant hits, the kind of place to expect the unexpected.
“We’re only open four days a week and we’re writing up new menus every day,” says Deutscher, who runs Unicorn Sparkles with a small staff and posts his handwritten menus online.
“Pasta is the one thing we kind of stick to — we can use pasta as a vessel for a lot of things we want to do.”
Pasta is the focus for the latest new kids on the block, too.
At Lumache, chef James Frost and his wife Heather Dosman offer a curated food and wine menu, based on Frost’s love of Northern Italian cuisine, especially handmade pasta.
There are only 16 seats here, but they’ve turned the tiny space (which once housed Ate and Hanks) into an intimate Slow Food destination, where you can sit at the bar to watch the chefs cooking while sipping a glass of wine from a small, sustainable producer.
Whether it’s Frost’s tender Agnolotti del Plin glazed in a beautiful red wine sauce, the impressive Lasagna Bolognese with 10 layers of tender green pasta, the spruce tip gelato or tiramisu made with their own house-made mascarpone, there’s skill and passion in every plate.
But even with a solid business plan in place, it was challenging for the experienced culinary couple to get their restaurant off the ground.
Frost and Dosman made the move to Victoria from Vancouver two years ago and spent much of that time preparing to open Lumache, running regular pop-up dinners at Café Brio and selling their lasagna and tiramisu to test the market, while searching for affordable space to lease.
“The original plan was for a 50-seat restaurant — this is about as small as it gets,” admits Frost, noting leases in Victoria are as high, or higher, than Vancouver, with the city’s slow, expensive permitting and licensing process an onerous barrier to opening a small business.
But when they eventually opened Lumache in December, the couple already had a loyal customer base for their traditional, artisan pasta-focussed menus, and reservations now fill up a month in advance.
“We just saw an opportunity in the restaurant landscape and people have been extremely supportive.”
A SHIFTING LANDSCAPE
We’ve had an influx of top chefs to Victoria in recent years, most notably Marilena’s Kristian Eligh and Andrea Alridge, the opening chef at Janevca, both arriving after impressive careers in Vancouver and setting the bar for fine dining.
Chef Julie Hyde is the new executive chef at The Courtney Room, fresh from Toronto where she earned a Michelin star for her seafood-centred cuisine at Restaurant 20 Victoria, the only woman chef with a Michelin star in that city.
And the dynamic duo of somm/owner Sydney Cooper and chef Billy Nguyen crossed the pond from Vancouver and are making waves with their chic wine bar, Rabbit Rabbit Wine Bar.
Like Vineul, some hospitality companies are investing in both established and new properties. The Fairmont Empress has reopened The Bengal room to serve breakfast and dinner while renovations continue on the hotel’s Q fine dining room, including the addition of a new raw bar. Il Terrazo has new owners with Top Shelf Management (Glo, Boom + Batten, Med Grill Royal Oak) set to take over operations.
Chris Jones (The Ruby, Jones Bar-B-Que) and Logan Gray (Discovery Coffee, Yonni’s Doughnuts), opened The Breakfast Shop in the former Bear & Joey space, and this spring The Ruby expands with a third location in Colwood.
Meanwhile, award-winning city Chef Rob Cassels (former Saveur owner) is working on his menus for a new food/retail concept in an historic property on Fort Street, and Cottage Hospitality Group (Wind Cries Mary, Rudi) is giving Birdman, their late night, fried chicken pop-up, a permanent home on lower Johnson Street.
For Harris and Vanderheide, work continues at Dough Eyes where there will be New York-style pizza, natural wines, milk shakes and ice cream, for daytime take away and evening dining.
They’ve already hired top talent to keep their restaurants running with Chef Brian Tesolin (former Courtney Room and OLO) leading the kitchen team at Café Brio, and respected veteran Chef Grant Gard cooking again at Brasserie l’Ecole. Once Dough Eyes is open, Harris says he will “hand over the reigns” to their culinary team and stick to future development and management.
“We want to host people, and we want to cook for them, so we’ll figure out how to do that, with the things we love and people we love working with,” he says.
“There's always a way to do it. People are always hungry. There will always be restaurants.”
This story originally appeared in Boulevard Magazine (May 2026)
©CindaChavich2026
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