Bow & Stern

Anyone looking for dinner in Chilliwack has to accept that the independent rooms are scattered rather than clustered. There is no restaurant quarter. The practical consequence is that finding dinner here is a matter of knowing addresses rather than wandering into something.

The highest concentration is downtown, in the blocks around Five Corners and in the District 1881 development on the old Chilliwack Cattle Sales site, but the largest number of rooms overall sits along Vedder Road through Sardis and Vedder, mostly in strip plazas that are easy to drive straight past. Out in Yarrow and Rosedale a handful of places have outlasted several owners and are worth the drive. Bow and Stern belongs to the first of those groups, the downtown one.

What the listing does not carry is a phone number or a website, and that is a real gap in this category. Menus, hours, whether a table can be held, whether the kitchen is running at all on a given evening: those are the things people need, and none of them are here. The name gives an impression rather than a fact and is better treated as one. For a room this central the sensible approach is to look in on the way past rather than build an evening around it, at least until someone has confirmed the door is open.