Smuggler’s Cove Pub

Great food, good prices, cozy atmosphere, and friendly staff. What more could you want from a pub? I had my first visit to Smuggler’s Cove today and enjoyed the charming ambiance made even warmer by friendly greetings from the staff. Our orders were taken promptly and the food was delivered to our table at a very reasonable place considering it gets rather busy, especially on a Saturday night such as this. All three of us enjoyed the hearty, comfort-​food style dishes and the on-​special beer on tap complimented it well. I’d recommend the steak and mushroom pie to anyone! All in all, if you’re looking for some of the best pub food town, don’t hesitate to stop into Smuggler’s Cove Pub.

Having spent the last few months in Victoria sampling various restaurants, I find myself returning to this quaint pub atmosphere for some of the best dishes on the Island. Their hamburgers and sandwiches are hand crafted and accompanied by in house recipe sauces. Great muscles and the soups are to die for.

Went for dinner at around 8:30 on a Tuesday night. The pub was quite slow with only a couple tables and a few people seated at the bar. Was promptly provided with menus and informed of the daily specials. Ordered the BBQ chicken burger which was good but very messy. Has a strong feel of a neighborhood pub, cozy but definitely a spot for regulars. Will be going again in the future, but ordering something less messy the next time around.

Great neighbourhood pub! Good food and great staff. thank you.

Great burgers! Smuggler’s is a cozy neighbourhood pub in Cadboro Bay. Visiting friends who live close by we often end up here for dinner. The upstairs deck/​patio is a lovely spot to enjoy a great burger and a pint. I’ve tried other items from the menu and find the taste and quality consistent across the board.

Looking for huge servings, decent prices and a casual atmosphere? Smugglers is the place for you. I was quite hungry so I ordered the nachos. I expected the serving to be large but it was closer to humongous. I have a large appetite but I was only able to finish half of the serving.
The peppers and veggies on the nachos were fresh and there were lots of them. The cheese was liberal, but it could have been spread around a bit more. The edges were bare, the inside was ½ inch thick in cheese.

This pub was recommended to me by the DHSI check-​in. It was packed and for good reason. They had a good variety of beer on tap and their food was excellent. It has the perfect pub food that I can’t get in the U.S. I will go back again before I go back home.

Things sure have changed. It is now my wife’s and mine favorite place to go for lunch. We have tried most things on the menu and have not been disappointed. I would highly recommend this place.

Stopped by this pub by chance tonight and what a pleasant surprise. The Tofino Pale Ale was a nice sort of local beer on sale. I had the steak sandwich with fries/​Caesar split (no extra charge) and it was great. Comes with crispy onions all covered with a yummy sauce ($ 17). The real highlight though was the people, both customers and staff. A real friendly place. Can’t say enough about Rene the bartender and my server: Inclusive, smart, funny — genuinely wants you to have a good time and come back. Great service. If she’s not the owner, the owner is lucky.

This is the cutest, cosiest and friendliest place to eat food in Cadboro Bay. Maybe in Victoria!
When we moved to Victoria a month ago, we didn’t have a kitchen for the first 10 days. Smugglers provided us with delicious food, consistent service, and an ambience that is familiar to home as Norm was to Cheers. Highly recommend the burger, and ask for BBQ sauce.
10/​10, every time.

When we arrived there were no other customers in the restaurant. The waiter gave us a look like he was already inconvenienced. We should have left, but gave the benefit of the doubt. It took him 10 minutes to come to the table and he was very curt and short with us, but we ordered drinks. Another 15 minutes later, we received our drinks and placed our order, again, not a very personable person. 30 minutes later we received our dinner. It was one of the worst meals we have ever gotten. I ordered oysters and not only were they huge but the breading was so thick I couldn’t taste the oyster and it was rock hard. The tarter is simply mayo and the coleslaw was made with old cabbage and mayo only. Tasteless and awful. I was hungry so I ate the oysters after pealing off what breading I could. We never saw the waiter again until he brought out tab. I told him it was a horrible meal and he started to argue with me and asked me why I ate it all. My response was to ask him if he had noticed that my plate was still full. Totally rude and basically blamed us for not telling him earlier. How could we, he was no where to be found. Horrible place, don’t waste your money.

Smuggler’s Cove has a nice selection of local Victoria micro-​brews and the food is what one would expect from a pub. Fish and chips, wraps, salads, etc. Prices are very reasonable and the service we had was just fine. We were here on a lovely sunny Victoria Saturday in the summer and our seat on the deck provided idyllic views of the neighborhood and fresh briny sea air. If I were lucky enough to live in the Cadboro Bay area this would be my local.

This is a real good pub. Nice location, cozy atmosphere, and surprisingly good food. The price is decent and the servers are really nice.

So much potential but doesn’t live up to it.
There are repeated reviews of people giving this place the benefit of the doubt on slow service. We have given this place more than one night to shine. Both times food service took in excess of 45 minutes.
Entrees trickle up from the kitchen one or two every 5 – 10 minutes. Initial drink service is quick. And they take your order, but then your wait person wont talk to you for the next 40 min. It’s as if they know their food service is crap and just can’t fix it. Order fish got no vinegar, fries came out soggy like they were made an hour ago. Sorry guys.

I’m at UVic for a month long class and my classmates and I wanted to hit up a bar. This was in easy walking distance from the door so we decided to give it a shot. Like other people have said, it’s cramped. We ended up outside on the patio, which was nice, but you had to more or less crawl over people to get to the table, and once you were in, it was hard to get out.
The drinks were WAY overpriced. I tried the Driftwood Altbeir, which was acceptable. I expected this to be a $ 3-​$ 5 drink and couldn’t believe the $ 7 bill I got for it.
On the plus side, our waitress was great. We were a big, rowdy group and she kept filling up our drinks and making sure we had what we needed. At one point, there was misplacement of a glass of water, which ended up in someone’s lap, and on his phone. She asked how his «appliance» was and we all thought she was referring to his shorts, so that became the butt of the joke for the evening.
Overall, fair ambiance, good staff, overpriced, but somewhat expected given the college town location.

I recently went to Smuggler’s Cove for wings night with friends. I had though that it was going to be a relatively large space, but when you go upstairs to the pub you find a fairly small space that has a generous, if somewhat cramped, patio. Most of us ordered wings, which were worth the $ 5/​lb we paid and not a penny more. While they were individually small, which wasn’t particularly surprising given the price, they were also incredibly dry, which was a bit surprising and disappointing. I had dry-​rubbed wings, and the rub was relatively tasteless and failed to really convey the flavour of dried red-​pepper and garlic. My companions, who purchased wings that had sauce-​based flavouring, enjoyed their wings more than I, though their wings were also dry. The moisture of the (unevenly distributed) sauce helped to offset some of the dryness.
Smugglers has a modest beer selection, and they actually ran out of their special beer of the day just after we ordered our first pitcher. Nothing on their beer menu was unique; you can get the same (or better!) fare almost anywhere in the city.
Will I return to Smuggler’s Cove again? Probably, but because it is the closest pub to where I live and thus convenient for a group of us to get to. When the graduate lounge at UVic is on ‘regular’ hours again I suspect that it will be my default pub, and Smuggler’s will be last-​ditch there-​is-​no-​other-​place-​as-​convieniant-​and-​nearby backup. If you can go somewhere else, conveniently, then do so. If you can’t then bring good company and try not to focus on the food.

It’s not usually busy, but the selection isn’t all that great. I don’t usually visit liquor store, so I’m not at all experienced in these matters. The Starbucks nearby has great coffee though: D

So despite having read this so-​so review, I came here with a group of friends for dinner because one of them really liked their cajun burger and the rest of us had never been here before.
I made reservations for 12 and when we came, they already had tables set up for us. The building looks pretty big from the outside, but you climb a set of stairs to a smallish second floor area.
As people trickled in to the table, our server came by to get drink orders from those of us already there. They weren’t impatient with us having to wait for everybody to get there and just made sure all of us had drinks.
So i’m not going to go over what everybody had to eat, except that we were there on a Monday and it was wings night, which means super cheap wings! Maybe a third of our table had wings that night and they all seemed pretty happy with it. I forget how much it was, but it was an awesomely good deal for a pound of wings. I think drink prices were pretty standard, a few of us had cocktails and there was no cheaping out on pours. The drinks were all goood.
All in all, we had a greaaaat time there, atmosphere was relaxed, good service with a smile, our food came out in a decent amount of time considering our big group and they gave two yummy cake slices for the two bday girls that night!
Definitely would go back for a night out with some good friends :) Four stars to balance out the three, since I actually want to give 3.5 stars.

***First, a Disclaimer: This visit was during ‘Dine Around Victoria’, which offers prix fixe menus from participating restaurants in $ 20, $ 30 or $ 40 denominations for a month or so each year. The aim of the event, I believe, is to get locals out to sample some new places. I can only imagine that the staff of participating restaurants are run off their feet and may even dread this time of year. BUT, that’s why the third star, to be fair. If we’d had this experience at a regular time of year, I’d only have rated our visit two stars***
Now that that’s out of the way — we went to Smuggler’s Cove at 7pm on a Saturday night. It was packed, and we were lucky to only have to wait 5 minutes for a table.
The waiter gave us our menus, we ordered water, and… he came back 15 minutes later with our water and took our orders.
Half an hour after that, my boyfriend flagged him down and asked about our appetizers. He said he’d check, never came back, but five minutes later someone else brought them to us. But before that happened, the couple next to us, who overheard, confided: «Just so you know — our food took over forty minutes. We were STARVING.»
My boyfriend’s crab cakes were really good. Decently sized, with a chipotle mayo that actually had some good chipotle kick. My caesar salad was average, nothing special, but pretty good, and not drowned in dressing which I often find a problem in pubs.
Our entrees actually came fairly quickly. My boyfriend was again the big order winner for the night. His seafood crepes were absolutely delicious. He really enjoyed them. The vegetables that came with it were really good, too, and he said «that was I think the best piece of cauliflower I’ve ever had.» The rice was meh — we both got the feeling it came out of a box. No proof of that, but it was bland, and extremely uniform in both colour and flavour.
My ravioli… well, it kind of sucked. The marinara was far too sweet and had a weird honey-​flavour which didn’t work and was kind of off-​putting. The ravioli itself was overcooked to the point of being flaccid and mushy, and there was no discernible mushroom flavour at ALL (it was Portobello Mushroom Ravioli, in theory). The garlic foccacia bread it came with was a bit burnt, but tasty enough.
Dessert was kahlua brownies with ice cream for both of us. Unremarkable, but chocolatey and basically sound.
The food wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible, for pub fare. But I have to say the service sucked. The only time our waiter asked if we were happy was when he dropped off the bill and said «And how was everything?» — long after he could have actually fixed anything we’d mentioned. We really were abandoned to our own devices almost the entire time, and our food took FOREEEEVER. Again, I acknowledge it was Dine Around time and probably more stress/​larger crowds than usual, but I think good service would be to say «heads up — your wait may be a bit longer than normal», and when that is indeed the case, a smile and a «Just so you know, we haven’t forgotten about you — your food will be along soon!» goes a really long way to showing you care. The truth is, we both kind got the feeling the waiter was entirely indifferent to us.
I might try it again sometime, if I happened to be hungry and in the neighbourhood — but probably not. The service really was pretty dismal, and the food wasn’t good enough to make up for it.