Marilena Cafe + Raw Bar
Downtown
Marilena is the Toptable Group's first room in Victoria, and it brings big-city polish to the island's capital — a sleek Douglas Street dining room built around West Coast cooking and a Japanese-style raw bar. Executive chef Kristian Eligh, an avid free diver and fisherman, returned to his hometown to run it, and the emphasis falls on local and global seafood paired with high-quality, sustainably minded ingredients. Nigiri, sashimi and rolls come from the raw bar; the wider menu spans towers, steaks and refined plates for a celebration. It is the most polished dining room in the city, and it wears that polish comfortably rather than stiffly.
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Ugly Duckling
Chinatown
Ugly Duckling sits in North America's oldest Chinatown, and takes its cues from the meeting of that heritage and the coastal landscape around it. The small, spare room serves a rotating tasting menu — French technique threaded with Asian flavour, everything made in-house — built on two promises the kitchen states plainly: serve only what they've made by hand, and work hard to make you smile. A meal might run from a seared Hokkaido scallop with XO emulsion to a savoury Chinese pancake of Island cabbage to dry-aged Fraser Valley duck. It is inventive without being cold, intimate without being precious, and it treats a tasting menu as an act of hospitality first.
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Chobap
Downtown
Chobap seats eight people at a counter and does one thing: an omakase led by chef-owner Clark Park, who trained in Osaka across more than two decades behind the sushi counter. Over about ninety minutes and eight to ten courses, Park blends Japanese tradition with Korean sensibility and West Coast ingredients — tender sashimi, torched tuna belly, an optional flight of rare sake. There is no menu; the chef sets the pace, and he is very much the centre of the room, part craftsman and part host. It is the most focused, personal dining experience on the lower island, and the smallness is a feature, not a limitation.
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