The Sugar Shack: The Road Trip Stop That Finally Gives a Reason to Pull Over
British Columbia has some of the most beautiful road trips anywhere in Canada…or the world. Driving from Vancouver to Kamloops, then north toward Prince George, you're surrounded by mountains, lakes, forests and the kind of scenery that makes you pull over every twenty minutes just to take another picture.
The food, unfortunately, doesn't quite live up to the view.
Most stops blur together after a while. Another Tim Hortons (gross, never in my LIFE). Another fast-food burger (if it’s A&W, and there are a LOT of them, I’m totally cool with that decision). Another gas station sandwich that you absolutely should not order. Have I eaten my fair share of them? Anyways, A&W Canada is probably is not the kind of recommendation that gets you excited to hit the road. Or why you clicked on this article…or maybe it is! Twist! This is a love letter to the A&Ws of the open Canadian road and why we hit them all! Actually, no…it’s not. Life isn’t fair enough for that (nobody would read that but I wanted to badly). So what’s left, if not A&Ws? There are a few breweries scattered along the way, sure, but they're not much use when you've still got another four hours of driving ahead of you.
Compare that to the drive from Vancouver to Whistler. You've got Backcountry Brewing, Sunny Chibas' fried chicken, Tacofino, and plenty of places that actually make you look forward to the drive. Highway 97 deserves a place like that too. Where's the mountainside truck stop diner? Where's the legendary pie shop? Where's the Twin Peaks-like damn good cup of coffee?
There’s one.
Tucked away in 70 Mile House, it's a little piece of Quebec sitting beside Highway 97. Owners Robert and Brenda brought the recipes and traditions they missed from home to the Cariboo, building a restaurant around authentic poutine, smoked meat, tourtière, and a ton of maple syrup stuff. It's exactly the kind of independently owned roadside stop every great highway should have.
Breakfast here tells you almost everything you need to know about The Sugar Shack. This isn't one of those places where maple syrup sits forgotten on the corner of the table while everyone orders the same bacon and eggs they could've had anywhere else. Maple is woven into the menu from the moment you sit down. Breakfast is served until 11am every day and covers all the classics you'd hope to find on a long road trip: eggs, bacon, sausage, hash browns, pancakes, and French toast. The difference is that this feels like breakfast through a Quebec lens.
But yes, there’s a poutine. Of course there is.
When owner Robert moved to British Columbia from Quebec, he couldn't find the kind of poutine he grew up eating. Instead of settling for disappointing versions (I’m guessing A&W wasn’t one of them, a perfectly fine poutine for fast food and nothing to write negatively about in an article focusing on a local, independently owned restaurant), he started making his own, and eventually built an entire restaurant around it. Today it's still the signature dish. Fresh-cut fries, real cheese curds, and peppercorn gravy. No unnecessary toppings. No trendy twists. Just a proper Quebec-style poutine.
That same philosophy carries through the rest of the menu. Real French comfort food.
Take the Tourtière du Lac-Saint-Jean. Most people outside Quebec have heard of tourtière, usually around Christmas, but the Lac-Saint-Jean version is a little different. It's heartier, filled with pork, beef, chicken, potatoes, carrots, onions, celery, and spices, all baked together into a comforting meat pie.
Then there's the Montreal smoked meat sandwich. Thinly shaved smoked beef brisket, toasted rye bread, Dijon mustard, and a kosher dill pickle on the side. That's all it really needs.
The menu also gives people in BC the chance to try foods that rarely make it west.
Cretons are a perfect example. If you didn't grow up in Quebec, there's a good chance you've never had them. They're a seasoned pork spread traditionally eaten for breakfast on toast, and they're another reminder that The Sugar Shack isn't trying to imitate Quebec food. It's serving the real thing.
Even something as familiar as lasagna gets the same straightforward treatment. Homemade meat sauce, mozzarella cheese, and exactly the kind of comfort food you'd hope to find halfway through a long day on the highway.
The restaurant also sells pure maple syrup brought in from Quebec, along with maple butter, maple sugar, maple vinaigrettes, and maple toffee. The bread and buns are made with maple sugar instead of refined sugar. The smoked bacon carries a subtle maple flavour. The baked beans are made with the restaurant's own maple syrup. Even the beef jerky gets the maple treatment.
There are homemade BeaverTails topped with maple butter, maple cotton candy, and more.
All of this is to show how versatile maple can be when it's treated as an ingredient instead of just a topping. It’s almost like…maple syrup itself is a character in this movie, you know? See that’s a joke on how hack film critics are always saying the location of a movie is almost a character in a movie. The Titanic in Titanic is almost like a character in the movie Titanic like “YEAH!”
Anyways, anyone here seen Heat? LA is like, a character in that.
Okay after a long hard road trip, maybe you’re starting to lose the thread, maybe you’re writing a long, nuts article about a restaurant and you went a few A&W threads because you think it’s a running joke when really it’s just making it a confused mess…maybe you start talking about how certain locations in movies are sometimes referred to as an actual character because they are such a significant piece of the story, which feels cliche. Either way, you’ll want a pick me up. Here, there’s coffee but they also serve espresso, tea, hot chocolate, and soft drinks. And yes, of course there’s an option for coffee sweetened with Quebec maple syrup.
Robert and Brenda have built something that feels much more personal than a syrupy gimmick in the mountains. Every dish connects back to the food they grew up with, and every maple product feels like another piece of Quebec that found its way to the Cariboo.
That's what makes The Sugar Shack memorable. Not just the poutine. Not just the maple. It's that somewhere along Highway 97, between hundreds of kilometres of chain restaurants and drive-thrus, they decided BC deserved a proper roadside stop.
And we agree.
AUTHOR: Hogan short
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