Dinner @ Wild Mountain in Sooke, BC - 12/01/23

Wild Mountain Dinners in Sooke, BC, Canada is easily the best restaurant in the area.

Local, fresh, organic, free range and ocean-wise ingredients in a menu that changes almost weekly.

On the far left is a Fire Roasted Beet Salad with apple, walnuts, kohlrabi, radicchio, Pecorino cheese & buttermilk dressing. The dressing almost tastes like it has stilton in it, but apparently it's the buttermilk. Incredible.

In the middle is a veggie pizza cooked in a wood-fire oven with butternut squash, fennel, leeks, arugula, Pecorino, mozzarella and béchamel sauce. It tastes as good as it looks. Nothing is burnt or overcooked. We also got some pickle dressing that came with the fried polenta (far left picture) and worked nicely with the pizza if necessary.

To finish the meal, we have Honey Chomeur - a warm honey cake with poached quince, buttermilk, maple pumpkin seeds and fresh apple. It's basically a Quebecois style Sticky Toffee Pudding with fresh ingredients. Served with 2 ounces of house-made Limoncello. Not too sweet. Tastes just like fresh lemon zest.

Overall, the best restaurant I've been to since moving to Vancouver Island from the mainland in White Rock, a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. I've been surprised that fine dining restaurants and steakhouses are hard to come by here. We have The Keg, a good, standard chain steakhouse native to BC, but very little other than that.

I literally live within minutes from Wild Mountain, so I'm only a quick cab fair away. The view is terrific, but it got too dark to capture a picture. I'll add one the next time I'm there.