The Beach House Restaurant, located on Cordova Bay Road in Saanich, is exactly what its name implies: a restaurant on the beach. As one may expect, they do quite a bit of seafood fare, usually with an Italian spin.
The Beach House is situated right on the beach with a gorgeous view of the ocean from the windows that span nearly an entire wall. The layout is quite nice, with a mix of upper-class looking areas and a lounge-style area. They definitely ran with the ocean theme, with a collection of fish mounted on the wall to appear as if going out to sea and a large metal shark’s skeleton mounted on the wall.
The menu offered good variety of the seafood/Italian-style fare, as well as a good range in prices to pick from. You can choose from the burger side of the menu and eat for about $14, or go higher end and have a seafood dish for around $20.
I was here on a work dinner, so I had a salmon steak (the daily special, advertised as market fresh). It was a Cajun-style steak with a lime sauce and some vegetables. While I didn’t care much for the sauce (much too sour for my taste) the salmon itself was fantastic.
My coworkers had an equally impressive array of foods, ranging from seafood pastas to pizza.ĘOne coworker had a clam linguine; holy cow (or holy clam?), they did not skimp on the clams. The pizza was quite good as well, and due to my gastral fortitude and my other coworker’s toothache, I ate half of that, too.
Of course, we also partook in appetizers and dessert. For appies, we had a blue cheese sauce and house-made chips, some god-awful mushroom thing, and calamari. The calamari was especially good with a crunch and seasoning.
As for dessert, I split a gelato and doughnuts with someone while the others had a towering slice of chocolate cake.
The Beach House Restaurant is a pretty solid place to eat and they hold the ocean-side theme very tightly. The decor and view are fantastic and the food is top notch. The only major downside is that if you hope to venture away from a simple burger, prepare to fork out some coin.