Wolf in the Fog

Book the Catch & Cook and the evening starts on the water — a Tonquin fishing charter out of Tofino, a few hours on the swell, then the kitchen turning the day's catch into a family-style dinner. Most guests never do it; it is a package, not a nightly option. But it tells you how Wolf in the Fog thinks about the coastline it sits on. The restaurant puts the whole idea in three words: fish, forage, feast.

The dinner menu spends every evening making good on them. It opens on small plates — a Tofino seaweed salad built from kelp, mushroom, puffed rice and daikon under sesame mayo and miso chili oil, with albacore tuna sashimi for anyone who wants it to lean further into the Pacific; potato-crusted oysters, three to an order, with wild garlic dip, pickled celery and truffle oil; an albacore tuna crudo turned bright with fennel, citrus and Calabrian chili; a Pacific scallop gratin over sushi rice and miso dashi. The large plates carry the weight: pan-roasted lingcod with green papaya salad, jasmine rice and satay; slow-baked halibut with hummus, za'atar and zhoug; a house pasta of radiatori in bolognese, finished with foie gras butter. For the table that cannot agree, the Pacific Seafood Tower gathers chilled octopus, oysters, spot prawn cocktail and tuna sashimi over warm lingcod brandade, Nashville hot halibut sticks and oysters Rockefeller.

What the menu makes clear is that this is a seafood restaurant that refuses to be only one. The borrowing runs wide — XO sauce on seared Humboldt squid with charred cabbage and peanut, za'atar and zhoug on the halibut, satay under the lingcod, a Szechuan smoked fish dip served with taro chips and chili crisp. And for the diner who did not come to Tofino for fish, there is a fourteen-ounce Canadian Angus striploin with confit fingerlings, garlic scapes and red wine jus, potato gnocchi with fior di latte and Sunwing Farm tomatoes, and a plain burger and fries that keep a mixed table easy.

The kitchen's confidence has an origin. Wolf in the Fog opened in 2014, when Nick Nutting left the fine-dining kitchen at the Wickaninnish Inn's Pointe restaurant and, with Andre McGillivray and Jorge Barandiaran, built something louder and more communal a short walk inland — an open kitchen, vintage plates, family-style cues, and national recognition as one of the country's best new restaurants almost before the paint had dried. Local reporting at the time named the three of them. The potato-crusted oysters still on the menu are a technique Nutting carried out of that earlier, more formal work, now grounded in wild garlic and truffle oil rather than white linen.

Drinks are part of the restaurant's own language rather than an afterthought — cocktails, craft beer and wine set against a menu with enough range to make a pairing a real decision. The produce gets named the way the seafood does: Tatlo Farms greens with rhubarb, cherries and beets, those Sunwing tomatoes under the gnocchi, rosemary focaccia grilled to order. It is a reservation-first dinner in a town where the meal is often the fixed point of the day, spread across two floors and a patio where the choice of seating quietly shapes the night. The seafood tower is the order a group reaches for when the evening is meant to count.

More than a decade in, the water still runs the place. The seaweed in that first-course salad came from a few minutes offshore; the fish on the tower swam in the same sound guests can book a charter across. Nutting left a fine-dining kitchen to build something that could be loud, communal and unmistakably of this coast, and the current menu keeps that intact — Fourth Street, dinner nightly from five, the Pacific doing most of the talking.