For as long as anyone downtown can remember, going out in Sooke meant picking one of two temperatures. There was casual: a burger and a pint at Route 14, wings on the patio at Sooke Oceanside Brewery, whatever the food truck was serving that week at the Night Market. And there was destination: Sooke Harbour House, the oceanfront inn on Whiffin Spit, where you booked ahead, dressed a little nicer, and treated the drive out West Coast Road as part of the occasion. Nothing sat in between. If you wanted a glass of wine on a Tuesday without committing to a tasting menu, you drove into Langford or Victoria to find it.
That gap just closed, and it closed from both directions at once.
The wine bar that took nine years to open
Chris and Theresa Boggs started talking about a Sooke wine bar nearly a decade ago. The idea kept stalling for the obvious reason: every time a storefront came open, the siblings weren't sure the town could support it. That changed in 2025, when a space finally came available and the math finally worked. They signed the lease in July, did most of the buildout themselves with help from family and friends, and put roughly $150,000 of their own money into a project they describe as a passion project rather than a retirement plan.
Pourhouse Wine Co. opened this spring, after clearing its final liquor licence approval, running seven days a week from early afternoon into the evening. What makes the story worth repeating isn't the wine list. It's what Chris Boggs said about why now, and not twenty years ago: Sooke's population has grown enough, and enough of those new residents have an appetite for a different kind of evening out, that a wine bar finally pencils out where it never did before.
Theresa Boggs was careful to frame the bar as an addition to the strip, not competition for it.
"We're hoping to build more foot traffic downtown. If someone wants a beer, we'll send them to the brewery. It's about creating options."
That line matters more than it sounds like it should. It's an admission, from the people closest to the numbers, that Sooke's downtown has been running with a gap in its offerings, and that the gap was finally worth filling.
The inn changed hands, and changed its own math too
While Pourhouse Wine Co. was filling in the middle from the casual end, Sooke Harbour House was doing something similar from the top. Catalog Hospitality, the Canadian hospitality group led by CEO Luke Evanow, acquired the property in partnership with Krystal Growth Partners in July 2025 and spent the following year on what the company describes as guest room upgrades and a full revamp of the culinary program around local ingredients and purveyors. Executive Chef Melissa Craig returned to run the kitchen, with Andre Saint-Jacques leading operations.
Craig's history with the property is part of what makes her return notable. She started at Sooke Harbour House as an eighteen-year-old apprentice in the late 1990s, before spending two decades at Whistler's Bearfoot Bistro and winning the top chef award at the Canadian Culinary Championships in 2008. Her coming back isn't a hire pulled from a stack of resumes. It's someone who learned to cook on that exact stretch of coastline, returning to run it.
The property's current booking pages describe three distinct spaces rather than one. There's the Main Dining Room, open for dinner nightly and weekend brunch and built around locally sourced beef, seafood, and produce, seating up to 65. There's the Sunroom, a smaller ocean-view space built for meetings and luncheons, seating 20. And there's a wine cellar seating up to 48, available for private tastings and group bookings. Evanow has also said the company plans a full-service luxury spa for early 2027. A guest who wants a quiet lunch in the Sunroom no longer has to book the same experience as a guest celebrating an anniversary in the dining room. The inn stopped being one single, expensive option and started being a small menu of them.
What Sooke's dining spectrum looked like, before and after
| Before 2026 | After 2026 |
|---|---|
| Casual pub and brewery fare (Route 14, Sooke Oceanside Brewery, Sooke Brewing Company) | Same casual tier, unchanged |
| Nothing in the middle | Pourhouse Wine Co., a locally owned wine bar downtown |
| One destination tier: Sooke Harbour House, single dining room | Sooke Harbour House under new ownership, split across a Main Dining Room, a Sunroom, and a private wine cellar |
Two businesses, on opposite ends of the price spectrum, independently decided the same year that Sooke had outgrown a two-tier town. Neither one was reacting to the other. Both were reacting to the same underlying shift: more people living here, with more varied appetites for an evening out.
The same growth logic shows up outside the kitchen too
If food and drink were the only category to see this kind of change, it might be a coincidence. But the pattern holds in recreation and retail, too.
The Sooke Skate Park at Throup Road reopened on May 31 after a $1.1 million rebuild managed by Newline Skateparks, replacing a facility the Rotary Club of Sooke first built back in 1997. SEAPARC commission chair Al Beddows called it more than a recreation facility, describing it as an investment in the community's youth and a gathering place meant to create connections for generations. A skate park built in the late nineties for a much smaller town got replaced with something sized for the one that exists now.
The Sooke Country Market made a similar move for a similar reason. Its longtime home on the grassy field by the fire hall only had room for about thirty vendor stalls. Market manager Teresa Willman now has more than sixty vendors on her roster, so the market relocated to Woodside Farm on West Coast Road, the oldest continuously operating farm in Western Canada, where there's room to grow and actual parking to go with it. The market kept its outdoor format and its Saturday schedule through late September, just with more room to breathe.
Even the town's planning department is working through a version of this same conversation. Royop Development Corporation held an open house in March for a proposed mixed-use project along West Coast Road near Eustace Road, envisioning up to 70,000 square feet of retail anchored by a grocery store, with roughly 200 housing units above street-level shops. It's still working through rezoning, with construction realistically years off if it moves forward at all. But the fact that a developer is pitching a grocery-anchored main street to a town this size, and that residents showed up in enough numbers to fill the community hall for the open house, tells you something about which direction people expect Sooke to keep moving.
Nine days in September that make the case in miniature
If you want the shortest possible proof that Sooke's civic life is scaling up alongside its dining scene, look at the back half of September. Three institutions hit milestones inside a nine-day stretch, right after the Sooke Night Market wrapped its thirteenth season on August 27.
- September 12: The Sooke Legion marks its 100th anniversary, a full century of the same building serving as one of the town's default gathering spots.
- September 19: The Sooke Region Museum hosts the second annual Sooke Crabfest, a fundraiser for Triangle Island Lighthouse maintenance, with Dungeness crab, corn, coleslaw, and bread cooked onsite and served long-table style on the museum lawn.
- September 20: The Sooke Harvest Festival returns to Sunriver Community Orchard for a family-friendly celebration of the season's apples, blackberries, and squash, the same weekend the Sooke Region Chamber of Commerce is running its own western-themed Community Fall Festival across town.
None of these events are new inventions built to chase a trend. The Legion has been standing for a hundred years. The Harvest Festival is a long-running fixture of the fall calendar. What's new is that Crabfest needed a second year at all, and that three separate organizations are confident enough in turnout to schedule overlapping events in the same nine-day window rather than spacing them out to avoid competing for the same crowd.
A town that couldn't support a wine bar twenty years ago, by its own owners' account, is now a town where the Legion, the museum, and the orchard can all draw a crowd in the same week without stepping on each other. That's not a coincidence of scheduling. It's the same growth curve showing up twice, once in a glass of wine downtown and once in a long table of crab on the museum lawn.
Whether you've been in Sooke for one season or twenty, it's worth watching which of these additions stick around past their first year and which ones were riding a moment. If you're curious what any of this shift in the neighborhood might mean for the value of your own place here, Kash Burley is happy to walk through it with you, no pressure attached.
