The Surprising Way a Dive Bar Became Our New Favorite Restaurant

If you’re unfamiliar with my background, I was a restaurant reviewer for Chicago Bites for about a decade and worked for a handful of large and small restaurant/culinary outfits in marketing communications thereafter.  It was my job to know the local restaurant scene and be able to pick a spot off the top of my head.  I know good food and where to find it.  In Chicago.

However, my culinary know-what doesn’t do me a lot of good on the road.  I don’t know who’s who outside of a few national chefs.  And international? It’s all new to me.  

So when Jan suggested we go out to dinner, I cringed a little bit.  I’m a snob and this is a hard city to be a snob in. Victoria is lovely, but most of what we’d come across was geared towards the tourist trade (high volume, catering to the wallet and middle-of-the-road expectations) versus focused on delivering a viewpoint or culinary experience.   To make things a bit more challenging, Jan didn’t want seafood because we’ve been eating our way through our catch from last month.  I didn’t mind the constraint.

I got to work sifting through the usual “best of” restaurant lists and review sites, and found that while there were some contenders (Olo, Ii Terrazzo Ristorante), most had that hyped feeling and were centrally located in the midst of the main drag.  I expanded out to more locally focused sites and where I could find them, independent locals, to see if their findings matched up.  I stopped when I came across the phrase, “it would be disloyal to eat anywhere else.”  Well, then.  That place? Hanks *a restaurant.

Despite complaints that it was small, dark and very loud (hello, Kuma’s!), there was enough pique my interest: a constantly changing menu, curated wine & beer list, specialty cocktails, and it’s run as a seasonally-focused food lab.  That definitely ticked the boxes I had in my head.  I have mad respect for a chef-driven local menu.  We got there at the crack of five o’clock because despite our best efforts, we’re still on central time.  

Good thing we did.  The place filled up fast on a Saturday night and had a waiting group of people on the sidewalk.  We sat smugly at the bar and sipped our cold beverages while perusing the meat-focused menu.  Two guys sat next to us and immediately started talking food — just our kind of crowd.  Turns out one of them was Chef Nicholas Nutting from Wolf in the Fog — our favorite spot in Tofino and by extension, all of Canada (we plan to dine more widely across Canada when we get the chance.)

The smugness went up a factor or two.

Menu ordering is always a negotiation with us.   We can’t eat like we’re twenty anymore, so we try to right-size our way to culinary bliss.  That meant saying no to dessert, the tasting menu and holding off on more than one small plate.  Hard choices brought us to the Carne Cruda — a delightful combination of sweet and sour over a bed of finely diced beef and drizzled with some of the best olive oil I’ve had in years.  

We watched several interesting seafood dishes pass along the bar — the clam in white wine sauce and squid over a bed of corn and beans missed our plates because we weren’t after seafood.  When the chefs got their Avian Nacho Chips, I almost had Jan convinced we needed to add onto our order. He talked me down with a hasty promise to come back.

And after I was served the best pork steak I’d had in years, a promise to come back was all I wanted.  That, and more homemade farfalle cooked a perfect al dente.  Jan didn’t regret his venison gnocchi, either. The game meat was almost as tender as the pillow-y gnocchi.  I didn’t watch him lick his plate clean, but I’m almost as sure he didn’t watch me, either.

So, this tiny eighteen-seat “dive bar” with black walls, an unhealthy obsession with Pearl Jam posters, and visits from area chefs has suddenly become my newest restaurant jam.

We’ll visit again before we leave, but I’m already scheming to get more than one small plate AND dessert.  A girl has to dream big.