The Pointe Restaurant

A whole Dungeness crab arrives steamed and unbroken, the kind of plate that asks a table to slow down and work with its hands. At The Pointe Restaurant, that dish sits near the centre of a menu built to put Pacific seafood first, and it says more about the kitchen's ambition than any account of the view could. The dining room belongs to the Wickaninnish Inn, perched above Chesterman Beach at the western edge of Tofino, where the water and the weather press right up against the glass. The coastline just outside is treated as a pantry, not as scenery.

The seafood runs deep on the current menu. Alongside the whole steamed Dungeness crab there is a Tofino Surf and Turf, confit halibut, a West Coast clam chowder, poached trout, and a smoked salmon plate, with an Acadian caviar service marking the top of the order. The land dishes hold their own — steak frites, a grilled maitake for the vegetable-forward diner — and a Tofino fish and chips keeps one easygoing option on an otherwise composed list. It is a menu with range, though its centre of gravity is plainly the seafood, where the day's catch carries the strongest dishes.

How a diner moves through that menu is itself a decision. There is à la carte for a focused order, a Table d'Hôte for a set progression, and a five-course tasting menu that hands the sequence over to the kitchen entirely. Wine is not an afterthought to any of it: Howard's Wine Cellar gives the list real depth, enough that a bottle becomes part of the evening's structure rather than a footnote to the food, and a connected bar extends the night before or after the table is called. Reservations run through the dining room, and the pacing assumes a full dinner rather than a quick sit-down.

Taken together, these are the marks of a special-occasion restaurant rather than a casual stop. This is a table a visitor books ahead and settles into, not one to wander into between errands on a Tofino day. The setting flexes across the day without losing itself — The Pointe opens early for a Pacific-facing breakfast and brunch before the kitchen turns toward its longer dinners — but the evening service is where it comes fully into focus. A meal here is best treated as the plan for the night, not an add-on to it.

The kitchen is led by executive chef Clayton Fontaine, whose cooking, by local reporting, draws on a standing network of Tofino fishers, foragers, and farmers, along with ties to the region's culinary guild. That sourcing is the real through-line: the menu bends with what the coast and its suppliers hand over from week to week, which is why the catch is where the confidence lives rather than in any fixed signature. It reads as a kitchen distinctly of Tofino rather than of a hotel chain, the coastal, sustainability-minded approach the town is known for set onto a fine-dining table. The restaurant belongs to Charles McDiarmid's Wickaninnish Inn, a property that has spent decades on Chesterman Beach helping turn Tofino from a surf town into a place people travel to specifically for dinner.

For a visitor deciding where a Tofino trip spends its one unhurried dinner, The Pointe makes its case on the catch and the coastline that supplies it. The advice more or less writes itself: book ahead, lean into the seafood — the crab, the halibut, the caviar service — and give the evening the time to move through its courses. What reaches the plate is only ever as current as the last boat in, the kind of freshness a coastal kitchen can promise and an inland one cannot.