Araxi Restaurant & Oyster Bar

A table can walk into Araxi for a half-dozen oysters and a glass at the bar, or settle in for a three-tier seafood tower and a bottle drawn from a cellar of more than a thousand labels — the same address in Whistler Village Square, two entirely different evenings. That range is the whole idea. Araxi opened on Halloween night in 1981, when founder Jack Evrensel named the restaurant for Araxi Evrensel, and it has spent the decades since becoming the room Whistler turns to when a meal is meant to matter. Dinner runs daily, and the oyster bar, cocktail bar, wine room, heated village patio and weekend apres service hand a single restaurant half a dozen ways to be used.

The kitchen makes its case first from the raw bar. The Araxi Seafood Tower stacks three tiers of oysters, chilled jumbo prawns, albacore tuna tataki, sockeye salmon battera, hamachi sashimi, red tuna poke, smoked wild sockeye and Nova Scotia lobster — a first course that reads more like a thesis than a starter. Around it sit fresh-shucked oysters from the Bideford River and the Sunshine Coast, wild hamachi sashimi under citrus soy, and albacore tataki scattered with ponzu pearls. The large plates keep the coast in view: miso-marinated BC sablefish in a lemongrass-ginger dashi, seared wild scallops folded into sweet-pea tortelloni, herb-crusted wild halibut, and an Ocean Wise prawn risotto built on Pemberton carrots.

Away from the water, the menu holds its own. Steaks come off an infrared grill in several formats — a Northern Gold tenderloin, a forty-day dry-aged PEI ribeye, A5 Miyazaki wagyu — alongside Yarrow Meadow duck and grilled lamb sirloin. Quebec foie gras parfait and Angus beef tartare open the meal for the land-leaning table, and dessert carries the restaurant's name on the Araxi Lemon Tart, a cleaner finish than the Valrhona chocolate fondant or the Black Forest gateau beside it.

What keeps Araxi from reading as generic resort luxury is where the food comes from. Pemberton produce, Rootdown and Goodfield farm greens, Yarrow Meadow duck, Brew Creek basil — the menu names its suppliers the way other kitchens name their techniques. Even in a premium price band, the cooking stays tied to the valley around it rather than to imported polish. The Longtable dinners Araxi runs with North Arm Farm in Pemberton are the same instinct carried outdoors, seating guests at the source of half the plate.

The wine is the other reason people choose Araxi. The cellar holds more than 11,000 bottles across over 1,000 labels, deep enough to steer a seafood-heavy dinner rather than simply sit beside it, and it has drawn Wine Spectator recognition every year from 2013 through 2025. Wine director Jason Kawaguchi keeps a by-the-glass path that stays with the shellfish and the BC fish. The drinking does not stop at dinner: a dedicated cocktail bar, a lounge and a heated patio carry the lighter hours, and from Friday through Sunday an apres window runs three o'clock to quarter to five, setting fresh-shucked oysters beside a nine-dollar Shochu Sour and rotating wines by the glass.

The cooking has a lineage. James Walt gave Araxi its farm-to-table direction and its BC-product focus over a long tenure and stays on as culinary director; executive chef Ying Gao now leads the daily kitchen, having come, by local accounts, from Vancouver kitchens that included Blue Water Cafe, CinCin and Elisa. Forty-odd years on, Araxi still opens onto Whistler Village Square, still sends out the tower and the sablefish, still lets a table decide whether the night is oysters and a glass or the full seafood-and-cellar arc. That flexibility, held together by a kitchen that has long known its own coast, is what keeps a resort town returning.