Wine Culture Magazine
Wine Culture Magazine
At Rabbit Rabbit, bubbles are always just a press of a button away. Photo courtesy of Rabbit Rabbit
It’s a drizzly Monday night in Victoria and things are, um, hopping at Rabbit Rabbit. Tonight is the new-ish wine bar’s weekly themed “staff meal session,” with the Beatles vs. the Rolling Stones on vinyl, Chef Billy Nguyen’s fish ‘n’ chips on the menu for only $15 and a warm welcome for anyone from the hospitality industry who drops by.
“I love making staff meals. It’s one of my favourite things to do,” says Chef Billy, who stole everyone’s heart as a finalist on Season 9 of Top Chef Canada. “Everyone has good morale and good energy. And I don’t have to think about work stuff, I just cook what I’m craving.”
His boss, Sydney Cooper, adds: “Staff meal isn’t usually cooked by the executive chef, so we are incredibly lucky.”
If you think a wine bar is going to be snobby or pretentious, think again. There’s a reason why this mainly young-to-middle-aged professional crowd is here on a school night, and that’s the genuine hospitality, intriguing wines and dynamic east-meets-west cuisine served up by Cooper and her team.
Chef Billy Nguyen brings inventive twists to classic dishes. Photo courtesy of Rabbit Rabbit
What makes all of this so remarkable is that Cooper is a first-time restaurateur who hadn’t even discovered wine or hospitality until a couple of years ago.
“I fell into wine during the pandemic, which, when I say that to guests, they say, ‘Didn’t we all?’” she says with a laugh. But the reality was that she had for many years found wine intimidating, especially as a woman of colour. “It felt like people were really looking down their noses at me, whether or not that was the case.”
Then she had a “life-changing” wine-paired meal at The Acorn, where the servers were so passionate and generous in sharing their knowledge that she fell in love with “the transportive nature of food, wine and service.”
At the time she was working for the federal government as a policy analyst, but she dove right into wine, learning everything she could through WSET, Court of Master Sommeliers and the BC Wine Ambassador programs and working at restaurants in Vancouver and Victoria in preparation for opening her own place.
She reached out to restaurant consultant James Langford-Smith (Kissa Tanto, Pamplemousse Jus) for advice, and hired Glasfurd & Walker to do the branding and Studio Roslyn to design the cozy-chic room. Then she met Chef Billy, and they instantly bonded.
“The mission became not just about opening a lovely space in Victoria. Now that Billy is here—I could never have imagined having a food program like this,” Cooper says. “It’s really evolved from ‘I want to bring my wine to the masses’ to ‘Oh my god I’ve got to up my game.’”
Chef Billy, meanwhile, was ready for a change. He’d been working at PiDGiN when Top Chef happened and found himself overwhelmed by the attention. He worked at a couple of pop-ups, notably Pizza Coming Soon, and spent some time as a personal chef. None of it was what he was looking for.
“I was feeling creatively stuck, and [Langford-Smith] reached out at the perfect time,” he says. It also helped that his “bestie” and fellow Top Chef finalist Andrea Alridge had recently moved to the provincial capital to lead the kitchen at the new Janevca.
When asked why he chose to move to Victoria, Chef Billy laughs and says, “Because Sydney asked me to come.”
Tuna tataki with coconut-yuzu emulsion, spruce-tip fermented radish and crispy shallots. Photo courtesy of Rabbit Rabbit
Chef Billy’s menu features dishes from England, where he grew up and studied architecture before falling in love with food, and Vietnam, where his family is from, with nods to China, Japan and anywhere else that takes his fancy.
“I like taking dishes people expect and putting unexpected twists on them,” he says. “I always like saying I love pushing people’s food boundaries because those are good boundaries to push.”
So he serves mushroom lo bok go, an umami-rich take on the classic Chinese turnip cake; “proper English-style chips,” which are thick-cut and tossed in beef tallow; chicken karaage drizzled with hot honey; a “Filet-o-Fish” bao, which is, yes, fried filets of fish on a steamed bun; a beef tenderloin dish he describes as “meat and potatoes Billy’s way; and a flavourful tuna tataki with spruce-tip fermented radish.
He’s constantly tweaking the menu—“I usually say to Sydney, ‘I have an idea’ and then I make it and say, ‘Eat this.’”—and plans to add a preserving program and spend more time foraging. “I believe in Billy so much,” Cooper says.
Cooper, meanwhile, has pulled together a deliciously off-beat wine program, including a wine-by-the-glass list that operates as a fresh sheet that changes three times a week. “One of the things that really aggravates me about the places I like to go to is that the wine by the glass list stays really stagnant,” Cooper says.
Given that 95 per cent of the wines they sell by the bottle are under $100, Rabbit Rabbit is clearly designed “to be that approachable wine bar that is also exciting no matter where you are on your wine journey.”
Cooper adds: “We work hard to create the kind of service and the kind of ambience that is really welcoming to guests. I love being here as a guest myself.”
Rabbit Rabbit is at 658 Herald Street, Victoria.
rabbitrabbitwinebar.com
Joanne Sasvari is editor of Vitis and The Alchemist magazines. She also writes about food and drink for WestJet and Vancouver Sun, and is author of the Wickaninnish and Vancouver Eats cookbooks.
Joanne Sasvari is editor of Vitis and The Alchemist magazines. She also writes about food and drink for WestJet and Vancouver Sun, and is author of the Wickaninnish and Vancouver Eats cookbooks.
Copyright © 2025 - All Rights Reserved Vitis Magazine
