Pluvio restaurant and rooms

Four Rooms Above One of Canada's Best Kitchens

Ucluelet is the quieter of the two towns at the end of the Pacific Rim highway, the one most people drive through on the way to Tofino. Pluvio is the reason to stop. Warren Barr and Lily Verney-Downey opened it on Peninsula Road in April 2019, a small building with a dining room downstairs and four rooms above it, and within three years it had been named Canada's Best Destination Restaurant and placed thirty-seventh on the country's hundred best list. Nothing about the exterior prepares you for that. The rooms are adults only, dogs are welcome, and the whole thing runs at the scale of a house.

Why It Works

A restaurant with rooms is a different animal from a hotel with a restaurant, and the difference is who the building is organised around. Here it is the kitchen. The dinner is the reason you came and the staircase is the reason you stay, which removes the one real problem with eating this well on Vancouver Island: the drive home in the dark and the rain. Four rooms also means the owners are on the premises. Barr and Verney-Downey run it themselves, and it shows in how arrivals are handled. Add a national award judged on the food alone and the case is closed.

Why This Location

Peninsula Road runs the length of the Ucluelet peninsula, so the water is never more than a few minutes away in either direction. The Wild Pacific Trail is the local argument: a looped coastal path with the Amphitrite Point lighthouse on it, and in winter it is where people come to watch the storms hit the rock. Pacific Rim National Park Reserve and Long Beach sit just north, and Tofino is about forty minutes on. Ucluelet keeps its working harbour, which is why it feels less curated than its neighbour and why the seafood arrives the short way.

Fast Facts

• Price: Premium

• Vibe: coastal, small, kitchen-led, unhurried

• Rooms: four, above the dining room, adults only

• Best For: couples driving the Pacific Rim highway, storm watchers in winter, travellers who plan a trip around a dinner

• Our Favorite Thing About the Hotel: that the staircase is the entire journey home after the tasting menu

• Dining: Pluvio, owned and run by chef Warren Barr with Lily Verney-Downey, cooking Vancouver Island and Clayoquot produce; Canada's Best Destination Restaurant in 2022 and thirty-seventh on Canada's 100 Best

• Amenities: adults only, dogs welcome, a building small enough that the owners are usually in it

• Attractions: the Wild Pacific Trail and the Amphitrite Point lighthouse a short walk away, Pacific Rim National Park Reserve and Long Beach to the north, Tofino about forty minutes on

The Line That Runs from Le Crocodile to Peninsula Road

Barr grew up in British Columbia and apprenticed at Le Crocodile in Vancouver, which is where a certain kind of West Coast cook still learns technique. He went east to the Inn at Bay Fortune on Prince Edward Island as executive chef, then came back to the Wickaninnish Inn in Tofino and stayed for years. Verney-Downey arrived from England by way of a Culinary Arts Management degree at University College Birmingham and an internship at the Wickaninnish, and never left the coast. Pluvio is what two people with that background build when they finally build for themselves: small, precise, unfussy.

Ucluelet Out of Season

The received wisdom is to come in summer. The better answer is November through February, when the storms arrive and the coast does the thing it is famous for. The trail empties, the light turns short and dramatic, and a four-room house with a serious kitchen is exactly the right shelter to watch it from. Dogs are welcome, which matters on a coast built for walking. Book the room and the table together; on this stretch of Vancouver Island the second does not reliably follow the first.