Sidney Street Market

Brad Holmes rewrites the menu weekly in a tiny, loud Chinatown room, so come curious and ready to share everything.

Downtown Victoria's modern hawker-stall with pineapple fried rice, butter chicken and cold beer: the happy, low-stakes weeknight date.

Sidney's teal boothed diner on Beacon Avenue, turning out stuffed Belgian waffles and five different hashes three blocks from the sea.

A deaf owned cafe on the West Bay Marina boardwalk, serving waffles, smoked salmon toast and an ocean view from 7am.

A tiny room at the far end of Sidney's pier where the halibut is worth the money and the Mount Baker view is free.

A tiny Cadboro Bay shop churning small-batch scoops like Vietnamese coffee and honeycomb, two blocks up from Willows Beach.

Thirty seats in Sidney, chef Matt Jackson's French-technique hyper-local cooking, and a 4.7 that explains why those seats go fast.

Victoria's neon-lit Korean pocha pub, where you pile the table with tteokbokki and pour each other rounds of soju all night.

An 1889 heritage house in James Bay where the cooking is vegetable forward, the light is good and nothing is in a hurry.

A candlelit brick courtyard down a Victoria back alley, doing wood-oven Italian for 35 years and not sorry about it.

Air Canada Best New Restaurants longlisted Kerala cooking with a patio pointing straight at Victoria Harbour.

Tasting flights of award-winning organic cider on a ten-acre Saanich Peninsula orchard above the water, reservations required on weekends.

A tiny chandelier-lit Fisgard Street patisserie of glossy macarons and cream-filled Paris-Brest that sells out before you have decided.

Chinatown tortilleria where heirloom corn gets nixtamalized overnight and pressed into tacos that embarrass every other taco in Victoria.