The best permanent menu items at Smiths Pub, R.I.P.

Smith’s, often stylized as Smiths, R.I.P., was a beloved basement pub located at 777 Courtney Street, a short walk from the Greater Victoria Public Library’s downtown branch. On Thursday, April 11, 2023, the bar closed suddenly, posting just a simple print-out on the front door:

Smiths is Closed
It’s been a great run, a very great
run, and we’re so appreciative to all
our staff, friends, customers and
everyone that supported us over 17
years

We didn’t want to go out like this,
but things happen

–Smiths.

Yeah, all things come to an end. The Old Bailey Pub, once in the same space, also came to an end. It had its own good, long run. Smiths kept their sign behind the bar as a kind of omen. Now, the Smiths sign lives in the beer garden at Boomtown, another downtown space whose days are very likely numbered.

If you’d never been to Smiths, you might not know the serpent-shape it took in the hotel-building it resided in: the guts of the main floor, east of a pool and parkade, and then upstairs was its sister bar, the Argyle Attic, and their shared kitchen. Somewhere in the bowels was a passageway leading into the courtyard, where a secluded patio, maybe the fourth-best patio in town, welcomed dogs and medium-sized groups of people when the weather was reasonable.

Depending on the time of day, the time of year, Smiths was a dive; a place to have lunch with your parents; a laid back date location; a sports bar only during the World Cup; a place to wait out the lines and the rain at the nearby clubs; and sometimes a club of its own.

The clientele ranged from eldery single men who’d exclusively order four to six PBRs four to six times per week before dinnertime, to Blundstone-wearing craft beer neckbeards, to clubgoing teenagers who yell a lot. It was never a “bartender’s bar” in the way that many of its neighbours had tended to be. Instead, it prioritized a short list of inexpensive, classic cocktails and a very well-curated rotating list of ten-ish craft beers on tap. Yeah, often you’d come for the beer but then you’d stay for the surprisingly not-awful food. The regulars all knew that this was Smiths true appeal: pub fare to rival even the nicest downtown bars, even though it was just a wacky dive with a bulldog statue and famous writers’s names graphic-tee-wallpapered over the walls, like an early ’00s nightmare.

Now that you’ve been reminded of the late great Smiths, the light that never goes out but did go out, let me present to you an opinionated list of the best permanent menu items that we should continue to sob about and demand the likeness of from our surviving downtown water-holes.

The kale caesar

It’s exactly what it sounds like. Available in both a small and a large size, and both, I believe, under fifteen dollars. In my long life I’ve had many pub–caesar salads, and Smiths was consistently the least slimy, the most capery and reasonable caesar salad for your buck.

The happy hour grilled cheese

I won’t lie that the four-dollar price is doing a lot of the work, but the beauty is that, yes, it’s a cheap, easy comfort eat that is entirely uncomplicated and it goes down a lot easier than the four-dollar pub-pickle or pub–pepperoni stick you might get somewhere else.

The chicken katsu sandwich

It wasn’t the best chicken katsu sandwich or the worst one, but until Ukatsu (also R.I.P.?) opened nearby, it was the only close chicken katsu sandwich, and certainly the only chicken katsu sandwich you could get at a bar. For twelve dollars, a substantial normal-bread sandwich on a menu mostly dedicated to pubby hamburgers (honourable mention: the chopped cheese) was refreshing.

The happy hour Driftwood Arcus Pilser

Getting us back to the reason we walked into Smiths in the first place. A six-fifty true-size pint of Arcus Pilser was a pretty good deal in 2023, and almost unimaginable now. Blue Buck was the other permanent tap on happy hour, which is another totally good and reasonable happy hour pick. We can mostly all agree on these easy-going local beers that are both about the same age as Smiths had been.

And now we gotta pour one out, R.I.P., to Smiths, one more time. In April 2026, we’ll have lived in a world without it for three whole years. I hope to see you at one of our remaining chill water-holes where we can reminisce about how O.P. Smiths had been.

This article was originally published in Destroyed Cinema Volume #8 in January 2026.