Smitty’s Oyster House: Seafood and bad service in Gibsons
Smitty’s Oyster House has 2 locations – one in Vancouver and one on the Sunshine Coast in Gibsons. This review is based on an in-dining experience at the Gibsons location.
I think the title of this post pretty much says it all 🙃. Let’s get right into it.
The vibe
Smitty’s Oyster House has a really cool location because it’s facing the dock and is really close to the water edge. The aesthetics is this casual since the building itself used to be an old marine repair shop so it kind of has that industrial feel with the long benches outside and the bar seating inside. Lots of posters and wall art inside.
Food and drinks review
Honestly – you can skip this whole food section because TLDR, I do not recommend this restaurant to anyone. It doesn’t matter if the food is good if the service is bad.
Texas mule ($13)
Smitty’s texus mule uses Tito’s vodka, lime, and ginger beer – a classic cocktail. It came in the little tin can as well, which I thought suited the look and vibe of the restaurant.
Raw oysters (MP)
3 of us shared a dozen oysters. I forgot the price but they are likely to be above $2 each. We had 3 kinds of oysters – kusshi, fanny bay and a third one that started with a M but I don’t remember.
The oysters were really tasty – super fresh! We both liked the kusshi and fanny bay ones more.
Chowda ($13)
Kelvin is really into chowder so he had to try their chowder soup. It came in a decent portion (can share between 2 people) and had decent flavour and lots of filling in the soup.
Seared scallops ($24)
Originally, we were going to order individually as a table of 6 adults, but our server recommended us to combine all our orders into a family sharing board because most of their dishes were made for sharing.
So a full photo of our sharing board is at the top of this post, but here we will look at specific items. In this photo, we have the seared scallops. One order for $24 actually only comes with 3 scallops so in this photo, we’ve ordered 2 servings of their seared scallops to have 6 in total.
The scallops sit on top of an apricot miso glazed pork belly and a bed of cole slaw with mandarin oranges and chives. I liked the pairing of the scallop with the pork belly (fatty and savoury!) and thought the coleslaw also added a nice citrus balance to an otherwise fatty pork belly. Portion size though is quite small for $24.
Banana leaf sablefish ($35)
Next to the scallops on the board, we have the sablefish that is cooked in a banana leaf. Underneath, there is some Jasmine rice, sweet peppers and a red curry sauce with some cilantro.
I would say this dish is large enough to be an entrée for one person. Because of the red curry and the banana leaf, it’s got this southeast Asian taste to the dish.
Halibut fritters ($25)
Here we also have 2 servings of halibut and fritters so this would be $50 actually. Under a pile of french fries, the halibut is actually served in smaller chunks and deep fried, so it’s a little different from how I originally pictured it when I saw “fish and chips” as the description.
Nevertheless, it was pretty tasty and it was really one of the only things on this board that really filled us up (we were hungry 😢). But with a price point of $50, I would still say the portion is quite small even though we ordered 2 servings.
Pan fried oysters ($23) + Crab cakes ($18) + Broiled oysters ($6 each)
In our last photo here we have 3 additional menu items.
First, the pan-fried oysters which have around 5-6 pieces. They are panko breaded and served with tartar sauce – they were pretty much what we expected but didn’t taste as good as the raw oysters we had earlier.
Next, we have the crab cakes that come in 4. They are butter fried and has some bell pepper relish on top and served with a grilled lemon dijon aioli. Again, a tasty little one biter.
And lastly, we had 2 broiled oysters with rocky balboa, chèvre chaud and keno. It kind of just tasted cooked oysters with a little extra garnish on top. I don’t think it was worth $6 each.
The service 🤮
We encountered some small mishaps in service that were mostly related to how long everything took. But in the end, it was due to a rude worker that really pissed us off.
We did not have a restaurant reservation as we weren’t sure which ferry we would be catching. We arrived at Smitty’s around 6pm and was told it would be a 20-30 minute wait so we put our name down.
At around the 30 minute mark, the host let us know that originally he was going to seat us at the long bench tables outside, but now he had to give priority to a reservation that arrived. We told him we understood and continued to wait to be seated. After waiting another 30 minutes (1 hour wait total), we were finally seated inside the restaurant.
By now it was 7pm and we were getting hungry, so we wanted to order right away. We also had a lot of time to look at the menu as we were waiting outside. But our server wanted to get our drinks and oyster order in first, and then come back and get our food order. Normally this wouldn’t have been a big deal, but she took awhile to come back and take our food order because she didn’t return until all our drinks and oysters were ready.
So finally she took our food orders after recommending us to put it all on one big family board. I’m not sure if maybe this was the biggest mistake because we waited for our food for another hour 💀. We even told the server that they could just bring us whatever is ready and it doesn’t have to be all at once because we were so hungry, but she reassured us that it was almost ready 😭.
The board finally arrived at 8:26pm 💀. We ravished it because we were all so hungry.
Finally time came to pay the bill, and we were pretty unhappy with how long everything took. However, after paying we realized we made a mistake with the machine and tipped almost 50%. We let our server know that we wanted to correct this and she deferred us to another person who could help us.
I am not sure if this guy was a manager, but I did see him shucking oysters. He came over with the machine so we could correct the tip amount, and he asked how much we wanted to change it to. We told him 15%, to which he then aggressively tried to persuade us to bump it up to 20%. After several times of telling us we should tip 20%, we actually had to tell him, “How about no?”
This seemed to tick him off because he then scoffed at us with his coworker, saying “This guy just said no”.
He then asked why we wanted to tip 15% and if there was something wrong with the food. We let him know that we just waited too long for everything and the service was slow. He then asked us if we always tip 15%, to which we said “Yes” (if the service is normal and the food is good), and he responded with “Oh… you’re one of those guys.”
Literally what the fuck? 🤬
I actually cannot fathom how rude this guy was. First of all, he never served us as he wasn’t the host or the server (who were both nice despite the slow service). Second of all, 15% is a normal tip percentage so I don’t know why he had such an entitled attitude. For a 1 hour wait to be seated and over 1 hour wait for food, did he really think he deserved a 20% tip, less alone a 45-50% tip?
After the 15% tip, we paid a total of $528 for 6 people (including our drinks).
I know we are on the island and there’s that whole joke about island time (i.e. things move slowly on the island…) but it was really the guy at the end and what he said to us that left a really bad taste in my mouth. Not only was he very aggressive in trying to get us to tip 20% when we already said no, he then tried to give us shit for “only” giving 15%. After the conversation with him, I truly felt like giving 0%.
Loewe’s rating: ⭐️
I would not recommend Smitty’s Oyster House to anybody. Portion sizes are small for the price you pay and you have to apparently tip 20% and put up with pretentious attitude and snail pace service.
Sincerely, Loewe
Not even including the Google maps info because I don’t want you to go there.