ROAR

Almost everything worth ordering at ROAR meets open flame before it reaches the table. The kitchen is built around a charcoal-fired grill, and that single decision runs through the whole menu — char on the oysters, smoke worked into a burger, fried chicken that arrives tasting of the fire that cooked it. ROAR is the dining room at Hotel Zed, set along Tofino's Pacific Rim Highway near Middle Beach, and it keeps all-day hours: coffee and breakfast in the morning, a louder seafood-and-fire service once the beach empties out.

The dry-aged beef burger is the clearest first order. It arrives stacked with bone marrow mayo, smoked tomato jam, beer onions, horseradish mustard, aged cheddar, and bacon — a familiar thing built with enough fat and smoke to justify planning a meal around it. It comes off the grill, like nearly everything else. The comfort side of the menu gets the same seriousness: Tofino fried chicken lands with charred corn, smoked garlic mayo, watermelon, pickled fresno, and a watermelon barbecue sauce, while the farmhouse wings and a plate honestly called bacon wrapped bacon read as jokes until the fire makes them count.

Then the menu turns to the water. The Dungeness crab broil is the centrepiece order — crab, prawns, sausage, corn, and potatoes in yuzu miso butter, built for a table willing to roll up its sleeves and share. Around it sit oysters on the half shell with a house hot sauce, BC ling cod folded into the fish and chips, Long Beach albacore served as tataki, and a Pacific wild salmon and avocado tartar. The kitchen keeps its fish close to home, leaning on BC and Long Beach names, and a seafood chowder arrives with Matty's bannock alongside. This is where the menu leans hardest on the coast.

What holds it together is a refusal to treat any of it as filler. The seafood and the burgers run through the same fire and acid, so the crowd-pleasers carry as much intent as the showpieces. Vegetarians get a composed main rather than a consolation side: beet ravioli with burnt goat cheese cream, roasted beets, swiss chard, pumpkin seeds, and pistachio pesto. The breadth is deliberate. A table that cannot agree on seafood, a burger, or something meat-free can still order well from a single page.

ROAR is the work of Mandy Farmer, who opened it in 2021 as the restaurant for her family's Hotel Zed — the retro, deliberately rebellious hotel brand whose Tofino outpost lends the dining room its colour and its volume. The live-fire approach is not styling: the kitchen cooks over a Spanish-built charcoal grill, and the location supplies the rest, rainforest and open water a few steps past the door. The restaurant ties itself to the ground it stands on, too, contributing one percent through the Tribal Park Allies program in support of Tla-o-qui-aht Nation stewardship.

The all-day format is what makes ROAR easy to fold into a Tofino visit. It suits a group as easily as a couple, and a carful of travellers as easily as the handful of locals who stay through the off-season. Mornings run to breakfast and coffee — a breakfast poutine among the plates — before the crowd builds. Apres Surf runs Wednesday through Sunday from two to five, a window built for a drink and a snack after a stretch in the water, and Sunday adds caesars and mimosas for a slower start. Dinner is the busiest service, and the restaurant steers guests toward booking a table online. You can turn up wet-haired for a coffee and come back for the burger after dark, and it is the same fire running underneath both.