Super, Neighbours in British Columbia: Victoria in the winter The Inn at Laurel Point (2 of 3)

For this third edition we ventured over to Victoria, the capital city of British Columbia and one of my absolute favourite BC cities to visit for a weekend. While it's not typically known as a winter destination it seriously feels like a wonderland over there. Maybe it was the parade of Christmas boats, or all of the horse drawn carriages (which are there year round), or the ever-present influence of the Queen (which I somehow find incredibly festive), but despite it being a little chilly we had an amazing trip.

And in my first Victoria post I took you on this Helijet trip, then I brought you into our room at The Inn at Laurel Point where we stayed, and now I'm showing you some of the food we ate in the hotel restaurant, Aura.

		A couple years back in the Georgia Straight’s BEST OF awards we took home an editor’s pick for "Best Navel Gazing Web Site", and while our non-profit organization that supports our web site (Vancouver Is Awesome, Inc) is focused on celebrating all of the awesome things that make up our city one of those things is it's proximity to other awesome places. In this series of features entitled Super, Neighbours in British Columbia we take you on adventures to other BC locales that we think you should check out.

Based on our experiences eating there it's no surprise that Aura was named one of the top ten new restaurants in Canada by Where Canada. Revitalized and renamed a couple of years back, almost every seat in the place looks out onto the harbour view. They describe it as "sophisticated without being pretentious" and I would first have to agree with them and second thank them for nailing my kind of dining on the head, and keeping it affordable! I'm only going to share photos of the food with you here, you'll have to visit yourself for the view.

Below is what my wife and I had for breakfast one day. I had the Aura Breakfast...

She had the eggs benedict...

For lunch she had a sandwich...

And I dug into the fish n' chips (I'm a sucker for newspaper wrapped fish and it took a while to unwrap as I just wanted to stare at it)...

And here's what I put on my plate for brunch on the last day of our stay, which wasn't actually served in the Aura restaurant but instead in the large, ocean-side terrace that looks out onto their Japanese garden (and, of course, the ocean). They had a Rat Pack tribute band called The Honeycrooners playing on this particular day and they handed out lyric books so you could sing along if you felt like it. And the selection of food was insane. What you're seeing on my plate here is a few of the countless buffet items that you can take advantage of. Plus juice and coffee and sweets and, if you're staying at the hotel, a copy of British Columbia Magazine that's in the pile of mags that they stock your bedside table with.

Save room for dessert because the final part in my series of three posts about the Inn at Laurel Point is a sweet one about the high level meeting I had with the most important employee of the hotel!