The story behind Sugar Summit Drive

Claire Cottrell opened Sugar Summit Drive in the spring of 2018 in a narrow Victorian-era storefront on Cook Street in Victoria, BC. She had spent the previous eight years cooking in other people's kitchens, most recently as sous chef at a well-regarded hotel dining room downtown, and she was tired of menus that changed once a year and produce that arrived in a truck from three provinces away. The name came from a road she used to drive as a kid in the Okanagan, heading up to a family orchard. It stuck because it felt like the right kind of nostalgia: specific, a little sweet, not precious about it.

The first year was genuinely hard. The room seated thirty-two and felt cavernous on slow Tuesdays. Claire was cooking, managing the books, and baking the pastries before dawn, all at once. What saved it, she will tell you, was the regulars who showed up every week and brought their friends. By the second winter she had expanded into the adjacent space, added ten seats, and hired a proper front-of-house team. The menu found its rhythm: four to six weeks per cycle, built around what the farms and the coast were actually producing. When the halibut is running, you will know it. When the Okanagan stone fruit comes in, the dessert menu shifts overnight.