AM magazine’s Best Restaurant Awards 2025 celebrates Greater Victoria, B.C.’s exciting food scene, judged by an independent panel of chefs and food experts.
BY JOANNE SASVARI | Photo by Sherri Kostian
Producer of the Year | Silk Road Tea
1624 Government Street | silkroadteastore.com
Perhaps no other city in Canada embraces tea and the culture around it quite the way Victoria does. That’s because they don’t have Silk Road Tea. Pity.
Silk Road was founded in 1992 by tea master and ambassador Daniela Cubelic, who learned everything she could about Camellia sinensis directly from Chinese and Taiwanese herbalists and tea masters, then studied aromatherapy in France. She has a profound knack for blending flavours that not only taste delicious, but play with our emotions, like the Mystic Rainforest, a black tea that whisks us to the woods, or the Happy Wellness tea, an uplifting blend of green and white teas.
She sources the finest and freshest organic herbs, flowers, tea leaves and other ingredients to blend her teas, not only for superior flavour, but higher antioxidant levels. Tea, after all, is not just refreshing, but has health benefits, too, which she has used in a line of skin-care products.
You can, of course, find all of this and more at the Silk Road store in Chinatown, but many restaurants and cafés across Victoria also serve Silk Road tea, hot and cold, in desserts and cocktails and just as it is. And why not? It’s the perfect taste of Victoria.
Runners-up
