Foodie Resorts

EAT Magazine, Summer 2006

The ultimate west coast foraging vacation for a foodie with buckets of cash, one that combines luxury with top-notch cuisine and requires minimal exertion (i.e., lifting silver cutlery and Riedel glassware), is a culinary extravaganza at the southern end of Vancouver Island. Each one of the following places is frequently visited by locals -- a sure sign of success. And all of them abide by "The Holy Trinity" of foodie rules -- local, seasonal, and sustainable.

The places we chose to explore are unique from each other, yet each one connects the dots along a gourmet trail that starts in Sooke, cuts over to Saanich, chugs back across the Saanich Inlet to the Malahat summit, and slowly meanders up Vancouver Island to the Cowichan Valley. From exclusive resort to country B&B, all are renowned for their exceptional cuisine. Culinary destinations have flourished on Vancouver Island thanks to pioneers like Mara Jernigan, formerly at Engeler Farm and now at Fairburn Farm, and Kathy McAree, whose business, Travel with Taste Tours, takes guests on edible journeys of the region. Resorts in particular are re-inventing themselves to attract a culinary clientele. Each offers additional “foodie” perks such as cooking classes, wine tastings and culinary day trips.

Sooke Harbour House, one of Canada’s culinary gems, is a pleasant hour's drive into the country (from the Swartz Bay ferry terminal if you're coming from the mainland). Many ingredients are literally right outside the back door of proprietors Sinclair and Frederique Philip’s homage to all things local — their edible garden contains hundreds of varieties of herbs, flowers and vegetables.

Walk through the gardens at Sooke Harbour House (tours start every day at 10:30 a.m.) and you'll discover that the ingredients on its restaurant’s dinner plates that night may include begonia stems, nasturtium tubers, grand fir and day lily shoots. When new arrivals who haven’t taken the inn’s tours of its garden and beachfront hear that chef Edward Tucson uses only local ingredients, they might think their food choices must be sparse, given the location -- by the shores of Juan de Fuca Strait on Vancouver Island. But it only takes a glance at the extensive and diverse menu in Sooke Harbour House’s dining room to dispel that idea. Some dinner guests may need a little coaxing to order certain items they have never tasted, let alone heard of, such as octopus with gentian sage vinaigrette, or sweet cicely ice cream. For those folks, it is reassuring to know that the list of awards for this small hotel is long, including many for Best Restaurant. They will learn soon enough that weird is wonderful.

If you’re curious about the bounty that awaits just outside the inn’s doors, and maybe at your own beach as well, call ahead to book a tour with Diane Bernard, at Outer Coast Seaweeds.

My friend and I met "the Seaweed Lady" in the inn's parking lot and she outfitted us with rubber boots and driftwood poles. We followed her dutifully down the gravel path to the low-tide line, Bernard’s bucket heavy with the seaweed she had already gathered. The beach is Bernard’s garden and classroom, where she convinces all but the most hardened skeptic that seaweed is delicious. She is well on her way to developing a seaweed cuisine.

“I wanted to get past the pickles, past the sprinkles on your whole-grain cereal in the morning, because I kept thinking, the colours are so vibrant, such great textures, we should all be eating this wonderful, fresh, nutritious, plant,” she said.

Dubious at first, we nibbled Alaria, which has a faint smell of rhubarb and a taste similar to celery. And sea lettuce, Ulva lactuca, which offered up a crisp, grassy taste, vaguely reminiscent of peas. Both were on that night’s menu, we later discovered, at Sooke Harbour house.

The tasting menu we enjoyed there comprised several courses spread over four hours, and too many items to justifiably describe here. Among the highlights were smoked albacore tuna with lemongrass mousse and ginger scallion sauce with Nootka rose petal oil and beet cracker. Next, we tasted Alaria seaweed (harvested by Bernard just hours earlier) with crusted crispy squid nestled amongst gooseneck barnacles scented with grand fir and mint chili glaze and Cobble Hill asparagus. (Where else can you find a menu like this?) The wild chinook salmon was quickly seared and draped with nasturtium leaf emulsion, with a side of tofu and wild rice spring roll. Another show stopper was the spicy hazelnut crusted Cedar Glen farm lamb loin. Again, a quick sear and it emerged almost raw in the middle, like a steak tartare, its light crust glazed with daylily flower oil and red gooseberry -- all from Sooke’s amazing edible garden. Each course was nothing short of alchemy. And we haven't even mentioned the cheese course (local, naturally), or dessert.

By contrast with the cosiness of art-filled Sooke Harbour House, Brentwood Bay Lodge has a cool, almost urban, edge with two-storey-high sea-view windows, West Coast art on its walls, and an open kitchen with a wood-fired grill in its restaurant, The Arbutus Grille & Wine Bar. Chef Alain Léger’s locally-sourced menu showcases the best of Vancouver Island's bounty; albacore tuna atop fragrant couscous was a teaser for a feast of fruits de la mer served in oversized, hand-carved Haida bowls that included a whole cracked Dungeness crab, scallop ceviche, salmon cooked three ways and mounds of clams, mussels, and oysters on the half shell (with all the accoutrements). Plan on staying a while….

Pastry Chef Bruno Feldeisen (who has a chocolatier background that includes two Michelin three-star hotels) creates a signature banana cream pie, chocolate ice cream, banana wafer and mango caramel sauce that is so addicting you may need an order to go. For casual meals, there are high-end pizzas with the skinniest crusts, sandwiches, and hearty chowders at the resort's marine pub, and a bakery/deli/coffee bar where you can fill your picnic basket with wood-oven-baked bread, locally-made cheeses, and decadent pastries. An on-site wine shop carrying hard-to-find local vintages reminds us that yes, these folks have thought of everything.

That everything includes guests’ entertainment. One of the options for guests to pursue is a fjord foraging or eco-cruising tour with a savvy guide like Matthew Smiley through Eco Cruising BC. (Tours can be arranged through Brentwood Bay Lodge.)

Born and bred in the area, Smiley dives and fishes in these here parts and has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the bay’s aquatic life. The tour departs from the marina on a glass-domed boat that seats 12 and takes passengers out to look at what area fishers have caught, bringing traps out of the water and showing passengers their contents. Spot prawns, red rock crabs, squat lobster and even the occasional octopus get hauled up for inspection, then sent back down to await the traps’ owners. A word to the wise: local rules and regulations mean lodge guests can’t forage for their own supper from this particular boat. There are fishing guides who’ll set a visitor up to do that sort of thing, though, and while the hotel won’t cook your catch for you, it will do its best to freeze and package it so you can take it home. Four kinds of salmon and the other local “big game” fish, halibut, call these waters home, and there are mussels and oysters, clams and geoducks in Brentwood Bay’s intertidal areas. Nearby in Mackenzie Bight lurk razor clams, butter clams, moon snails and sea cucumbers. But there are also red tides, which can result in deadly shellfish. Only the truly and freshly informed should rummage around without a local expert.

The Mill Bay Ferry is a stone's throw from Brentwood Bay Lodge and a convenient route across the Sannich Inlet (bypassing Victoria and the long haul up the Malahat). If you take a late morning ferry, a 15 minute drive from Mill Bay to Merridale Ciderworks in Cobble Hill will get you there just in time for early lunch at its new bistro, La Pommeraie. Sip a Scrumpy (one of several hand-crafted, award-winning ciders), nibble from a platter of local cheeses and breads, and take a self-guided orchard walk. Then choose a table in the west coast style cider house with vaulted ceilings or dine al fresco on the wrap-around veranda with apple trees and a deer pond as background.

Just 15 minutes south will place you on top of the Malahat and the Aerie Resort. Noted French independent hotel association Relais & Chateaux (there are only 13 association-approved properties in Canada) demands four things of its member properties: courtesy, character, calm and cuisine, and the Aerie Resort definitely fits its criteria. With a bird’s eye view of Finlayson Arm, hawks and eagles gliding below the widows of its uppermost villas, the Aerie is designed to look like an Italian villa rather than something that sprang out of the B.C. wilderness. Its restaurant, too, has a European feeling, with a comprehensive wine list and a sophisticated French chef at the helm.

Normandy may be where he comes from, but Aerie Executive Chef Christophe Letard’s dining room menu and private afternoon cooking classes showcase the Cowichan Valley in the most surprising and delicious culinary combinations. Letard’s seminars last two or three hours in the handsome kitchen of the newly opened Villa Cielo. Guests are invited to join Letard as he performs tasks like deboning fillets of arctic char and prepares multiple courses of high-end, beautifully presented cuisine. They can dine on these treats at the kitchen island or eat in the villa’s luxurious private dining room. After an afternoon like that, they may want to skip dinner… but for those who want to splurge, there are tasting menus in categories that include seafood, vegetarian or “farmers market.” Or choose from the a la carte menu: fragrant lemongrass and lobster broth with outercoast seaweed, sea urchin and oyster to start. For us, it was a toss-up between the duck breast from Cowichan Bay Farm or Salt Spring Island rack of lamb, so we had both and swapped bites. Both were unctuous, succulent and cooked to perfection, medium rare. And the organic beet, mushroom and quail egg salad was drizzled with a Venturi-Schultze balsamic vinegar elixir, produced by the local winemakers. Whatever you order, be sure to leave room for the pineapple and vanilla goat cheese crumble with citrus and lemongrass syrup if it’s on offer. As if you aren't high enough in the clouds…

Aerie manager James Kendal can also arrange an edible tour with Kathy McAree and her "Travel with Taste Tours" the next morning. (This is especially helpful if you don’t want to get lost on the rural roads every five minutes, as we did.) McAree is a charming Victoria-based expert on the area who’ll take a visitor to meet artisan cheese makers like Hilary and Patty Abbott, pop by Cowichan Bay Farm for a gander at its pasture-raised poultry (both the stuff that’s still clucking and the stuff that’s in the freezer in the farm’s honour-system sales cottage), and introduce you to knowledgeable staff at places like Cherry Point, now the second aboriginal-owned winery in North America. It’s a good idea to bring a picnic-style cooler along on this trek so you can stock up on superlative chicken sausage, duck and cheese and keep it cool until you get home. (Cherry Point’s Blackberry Port, on the other hand, is great at room temp.)

Next morning, head north and spend a few hours meandering country roads through the bucolic Cowichan Valley. Sometimes referred to as “Canada's Provence,” the area is verdant and lush with vineyards and farms. Try to time it as we did, and arrive just in time for lunch at Fairburn Farm. Host Mara Jernigan, late of Engeler Farm, not only provides a B & B to guests but also puts on Sunday lunches that celebrate area foodstuffs, cultivated, produced and wild. (Book well ahead; see number below.) She can also tip you off to nearby treasures like Duncan’s Blue Grouse Estate Winery, definitely worth checking out for tastings. Be sure to try the 2003 Siegerrebe. Owner Hans Kiltz is a scientist and if you’re lucky and he’s available, he can take you through the winemaking process. Jernigan, who, like Sooke’s Sinclair Philip, helped establish the Slow Food movement on Vancouver Island and continues to talk up eating what your “terroir” produces, walks the walk. Our lunch, more casual than the multi-coursed Sunday events taking place all summer, was the essence of unstuffy delectability, with a frittata made of farm eggs, fresh herbs and sheep’s cheese (made up the road, of course), and a salad composed of local white and green asparagus, greens, tomatoes (hothouse in May, but still V.I.), and seared duck from “Lyle’s,” a.k.a. Cowichan Bay Farms. The vinaigrette’s balsamic vinegar was, of course, from Venturi-Schulze winery and is much prized in this area.

Jernigan's dining room is more Tuscan than Provencal with sunshine yellow and orange walls as bright as our breakfast eggs. Her specialty is Italian cuisine and Sunday lunches, composed of six courses, will include a hand-made pasta course. Plan on grazing on the veranda for several hours as you take in the view of Koksilah Ridge and the farm's water buffalo grazing in the pasture.

Jernigan and neighbour Bill Jones (the chef, cookbook author and wild foods expert) offer culinary getaways throughout the summer, including a one-hour walk through the forest and along the trans-Canada trail from Fairburn Farm to Jones' Deerholme Farm. Along the way (depending on the season), Jones will identify plants used by First Nations people, both edible and medicinal, along with the usual suspects such as mushrooms and edible weeds. Jones just renovated a 1918 cottage at Deerholme Farm into a demonstration kitchen, seating up to 24 people for dinners and 8-10 for cooking classes.

After all that exercise, Jernigan will take you on a tour of Duncan Farmer's Market followed by a hands-on cooking class, and a late lunch back at Fairburn Farm. You can’t get much more down to earth and delicious than that.