Sugar Summit Drive is a neighbourhood restaurant in Victoria, BC, serving seasonal Canadian cooking with a playful twist. The kind of place you come back to every week without quite knowing why.
Reservations are easy online, or just call us. Walk-ins always welcome at the bar.
Every July, the Okanagan stone fruit starts arriving and the kitchen at Sugar Summit Drive shifts into a different gear. Peaches, nectarines, sour cherries, Italian prunes: they come in fast, they are at their best for about two weeks, and then they are gone. Cooking with them well means paying attention to that window and not trying to stretch it.
Read more →When Sugar Summit Drive opened in 2018, the wine list was twelve bottles long. It is still about twelve bottles long. That was not an accident or a budget constraint. A short list, changed regularly, is genuinely more useful to a guest than a long list that sits still for a year.
Read more →Sunday brunch at Sugar Summit Drive runs once a week, 10am to 2pm, and it books up faster than any other service we run. We started it in the second year, mostly because Claire wanted an excuse to make egg dishes and pastries in the same service. It has been the same format ever since.
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Claire Cottrell grew up in the Okanagan and moved to Victoria at nineteen to study culinary arts at Camosun College. After graduating she worked her way through several kitchens in the city, spending the longest stretch as sous chef at a hotel dining room on Government Street. In 2018 she opened Sugar Summit Drive on Cook Street, driven by a straightforward conviction: that a neighbourhood restaurant should cook what is actually growing nearby. She still writes every menu and bakes every morning. On days off she tends a small vegetable plot in James Bay and is working, slowly, through a collection of mid-century Canadian cookbooks.
We always hold a few spots at the bar for walk-ins, even on Friday and Saturday nights. If you are coming as a group of four or more, a reservation is a good idea. For Sunday brunch, we strongly recommend booking ahead because it fills up by Thursday most weeks.
We do not turn tables. A three-course dinner usually runs about ninety minutes, but if you want to sit and talk for two hours, that is fine. We will never hover. The last seating is at 9pm, so if you book at 8:30 you will have the room to yourselves by the end.