Long before the first course arrives, Chef Harris Sakalis has already made a series of decisions rooted not in trend or technique alone, but in relationship. With experience gathered across Europe, the
Middle East, and North America, Sakalis brings a sensibility to ARC Restaurant at Fairmont Waterfront that feels both considered and lived-in.
He speaks about the menu as a reflection of the world he inhabits, shaped by cultural memory, personal history, and the relationships he has cultivated with the farmers, fishers, and artisans of British Columbia. “When you look at our menu, you can immediately see those global influences,” he says. Flavours from his Greek upbringing appear alongside touches of miso and harissa, references to both his travels and the Japanese heritage woven through his family life. These are not fusions for effect. They are honest expressions of a chef who cooks from his own story.
“Seasonality is really the starting point for everything on the Province to Plate menu,” Sakalis explains, noting that around ninety percent of the ingredients are sourced within BC. The Province to Plate dinner menu rotates with the seasons, and it is precisely this quality that draws travellers from across Canada to the Fairmont Waterfront’s table. Summer brings the program into full expression — the rooftop potager garden is at its most abundant, the coast is generous, and the light over Vancouver Harbour makes the dining room feel like an extension of the city itself. Sakalis treats each iteration as a new conversation with the land. The menu is never finished, only current.
Directly above the kitchen, the Fairmont Waterfront’s rooftop apiary is as much a part of Sakalis’ culinary program as any farm relationship or fishing connection. Home to thousands of honeybees and native solitary mason bees, the garden and its hives operate in partnership with Hives for Humanity, whose involvement has shaped both the apiary’s design and its community reach. Since 2014, the hotel has installed over two dozen mason bee houses across Vancouver as part of the Pollinator Corridor Project, a national initiative that speaks to the same values running through every plate Sakalis sends from the kitchen. The honey produced on the rooftop finds its way into the menu; the pollinators sustain the garden that feeds the restaurant. It is a closed loop, and a deliberate one.
What distinguishes Harris Sakalis is not only what he puts on the plate, but the way he articulates what BC’s culinary identity actually means. His definition of luxury is grounded in connection to land and sea rather than in spectacle. “Luxury is not about complexity, it is about purity,” he says. Purity, in his kitchen, means Chinook salmon from cold coastal waters, vegetables grown within the province, and the kind of cooking that does not need to explain itself.
Harris Sakalis invites guests to experience the region as he does: through the people who shape it, the seasons that guide it, and the honest flavours that make BC’s culinary landscape worth travelling for. At ARC Restaurant, that invitation arrives three courses at a time.