Steveston Village: A Complete Guide to the Waterfront and Beyond

I live four blocks off Moncton Street, close enough to hear the gulls working the dock before I hear my alarm. What follows is the walk-through I have been sending friends by text message for years, cleaned up and put in one place.

Steveston sits in the southwest corner of Richmond BC, where the Fraser River gives up and becomes the Strait of Georgia. It is a working harbour with a village grown over the top of it, and the two halves do not always agree with each other. Understanding that is most of what you need in order to enjoy the place.

Getting here, and where to put the car

There is no Canada Line station in Steveston. From Brighouse, the last stop on the line, you catch a bus south and it is fifteen or twenty minutes depending on the lights. Driving from the rest of Richmond, you come down No. 1 Road or Railway Avenue and turn west when the houses run out.

Parking is where people go wrong. The lots along Bayview Street fill by late morning on any sunny weekend, and then everybody circles them, which turns a ten-minute problem into a forty-minute one. What I do instead is park north of Moncton in the residential blocks, read the signs carefully because some of them are permit-limited, and walk four minutes. In July I do not drive down at all. I ride.

The waterfront

Bayview Street is the strip everyone photographs: boardwalk, boats, wooden buildings standing on pilings over the water. Walk it, but walk past the first hundred metres. The stretch east toward Imperial Landing is quieter, and the light on it in the late afternoon is better than anything you will get in the middle of the village.

Fisherman's Wharf is the reason the village exists at all. The commercial fleet ties up here, and at the public sales float you can buy directly off the boats. Spot prawns in late spring, then salmon, tuna, sometimes crab or halibut, all of it depending on the season and on who came in. This is not a market with posted hours. It is fishermen selling what they caught, so the answer to whether there will be anything is usually yes on a weekend morning and less so by mid-afternoon. Bring cash. Bring a cooler and something for ice. Ask what came in this morning as opposed to yesterday, because they will tell you straight and the answer matters.

If you have never done this, the thing to know is that a whole fish is a whole fish. Nobody is filleting it for you. I learned to do it badly and then less badly, and it is worth twenty minutes of watching videos beforehand.

The tell for a good fish window in this village is not the fish. It is whether the chips turn up limp. Limp chips mean tired oil, and tired oil means somebody is busy in the wrong way.

Moncton Street

Moncton is the old main street: two short blocks of low buildings with the museum and the little original post office sitting in the middle of them. This is where I spend most of my time. Steveston Bakery is my Sunday walk, and I am not going to pretend it is doing anything clever. It does ordinary things properly, which is rarer and harder. The Steveston Cafe & Hotel is the closest the village has to a room where the order is already known, and it moves at the pace of a place that is not trying to impress you.

The shops between them rotate more than they used to. A few good independents, a few that exist to sell nautical-themed home decor, and you will know which is which inside four seconds. My one piece of advice is not to walk past the hardware store. Steveston has held on to a real hardware store far longer than it had any right to, and those do not come back once they go.

Fish and chips, and the argument about it

You are going to eat fish and chips, so let me save you the research. Pajo's Fish & Chips is out on the float in the harbour, and eating there is half about sitting on a dock with your feet over the water and defending your lunch from gulls who have done this before. The batter is light. The lineup builds around midday in summer and does not really let up until the afternoon, so going at 11:30 will make you feel clever. Dave's Fish & Chips is up in the village with an actual restaurant around it, a heavier batter, and in my opinion the better halibut.

My honest ranking is Pajo's for the setting and Dave's for the fish. If you have kids and the sun is out, that decision has already been made for you. If it is raining in February and you want to sit down indoors, it is Dave's and it is not close.

The rest of the eating

Steveston is small enough that the restaurant list stays manageable, and it is better than you would expect from anywhere with this much foot traffic. Shady Island Seafood Bar & Grill has the patio position on the waterfront and earns its summer crowds, though I go more often for a pint and something to pick at than for a full meal. Blue Canoe Waterfront Restaurant is upstairs with the view, which is what you are paying for, and it is the room I book when relatives visit and I want the water to do the work for me. Kisamos Greek Taverna is the neighbourhood standby, unfussy and consistent, the kind of place you end up at on a Wednesday without having decided anything. G-Men at Steveston Ramen Shop is where I go on a cold night when I want one bowl and no conversation.

For a drink, Britannia Brewing Steveston is where I end up most often, partly because it is close to me and partly because the room works whether there are two of you or seven. In summer, Sweet Surrender Gelato is the reason I keep walking after dinner instead of going home.

Two caveats. The village empties out at night more than visitors expect, and several kitchens close earlier than you would guess for somewhere with a boardwalk, so check before you drive down for a late dinner. And weekend brunch here is oversubscribed everywhere, without exception. Go at nine or go at one.

The history is not decoration

The Gulf of Georgia Cannery, at the west end of the waterfront, is a national historic site and it is genuinely good. The canning line is still standing where it stood, the herring reduction plant still smells faintly of what it used to be, and the whole thing takes about an hour. Britannia Shipyards, east along the boardwalk, is the one locals send people to. The buildings sit on stilts over the mud and you walk through them on boardwalks, and the Murakami house is the part that stops people mid-sentence.

Because that is the other Steveston. Before 1942 this was one of the largest Japanese Canadian communities in the country, built around the boats and the canneries. Then the internment orders came, the boats were seized, and most of those families never got them back. Some returned after the war. Many did not. You can walk past a great deal of that history here without noticing it, and I would rather you noticed, because it is a large part of why the village looks the way it does.

Garry Point and the dyke

Keep going west past the cannery and the village runs out into Garry Point Park: flat, windy, wide open to the Strait. There is a Japanese garden in it, a memorial to fishermen lost at sea, and the best sunset in Richmond. It deserves its own guide, and it has one.

From Garry Point the West Dyke Trail runs north along the water toward Terra Nova, roughly five and a half kilometres of gravel with the Sturgeon Bank marsh on your left the whole way. I ride it most mornings with Biscuit trotting beside me. The only real tip is that the wind usually comes off the water from the west, so head out into it and let it push you home.

An afternoon that works

• Get to the wharf before eleven. Look at the fish even if you are not buying any.
• Walk east along the boardwalk to Britannia and back. Forty minutes with stops.
• Eat. Settle the Pajo's versus Dave's question according to the weather.
• Walk Moncton, buy bread, ignore the driftwood signs with sayings painted on them.
• Finish at Garry Point about an hour before sunset, wearing the jacket you were sure you would not need.

That is the version I would run with somebody visiting for the first time. If you live here, the real answer is that Steveston is a Tuesday-morning place rather than a Saturday-afternoon one. Come on a grey weekday in November when the fleet is in and the boardwalk belongs to you, and you will understand why the people who move here do not move away.