Grocery Stores
The Vancouver chain's largest store, about 19,000 square feet on Garden City Road and open 8:30am to 10pm daily. Straightforward Chinese-Canadian grocery shopping: fresh meat and seafood counters, stacked produce, bulk dry goods and sauces.
At roughly 19,000 square feet, this is the largest store in the 88 chain, and it sits on Garden City Road rather than inside a mall. What you get is a straightforward version of the format: fresh meat and seafood counters, produce stacked high and turned over fast, bulk dry goods, and a sauce aisle deep enough to hold the specific brand of oyster sauce somebody in your family insists on.
Richmond's grocery landscape is layered in a way newcomers take a while to sort out. There are the big Asian supermarket anchors inside the malls, the specialist produce shops, the Japanese and Korean stores, and then the mid-size Chinese-Canadian supermarkets where most families actually shop week to week. This belongs to that last group. It is the least glamorous and the most useful of the four tiers.
Garden City Road is the quieter parallel to No. 3 Road, one street east, and shopping along it feels nothing like doing the same shop inside a Golden Village mall. The honest test of any store at this size is the leafy greens, and the time to apply it is late on a Sunday afternoon rather than first thing on a Thursday, when everything anywhere looks fine. Go with a list. The sauce aisle alone will otherwise absorb twenty minutes and produce three jars nobody asked for.
In the City Centre neighbourhood of Richmond.
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Other grocery stores and nearby businesses in the Richmond directory.
An older, no-frills Park Road supermarket that has outlasted flashier neighbors. Free parking, narrow aisles, and a genuinely pan-Asian shelf mix, with Chinese, Filipino, Malaysian and Indonesian pantry items sitting side by side at fair prices.
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Over 10,000 square feet of Japanese goods on Alderbridge Way, most of it imported directly. Bento, sushi and hot food made in-house each morning, plus frozen fish, seasonings, cosmetics and kitchenware. It closes at 6pm, so go earlier than you think.
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A West Cambie Japanese grocer that stocks the specific things other stores skip: baking and cooking ingredients, wagyu and sashimi-grade fish, regional snacks, and hot food to take away. Staff move between Japanese and English without any fuss.
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A busy Chinese supermarket in the plaza on No. 3 Road, popular for a well-stocked produce floor, a barbecue counter locals rate for leaner char siu, and bulk dace fish paste. Cashiers work fast; finding a parking spot is the only hard part.
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A mid-size Asian supermarket on Odlin Road in West Cambie, quieter than the No. 3 Road giants. Rice in every format, sauces, frozen dim sum, and a produce section priced for people cooking Chinese food at home most nights of the week.
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A working family farm on Steveston Highway with a market attached: potatoes, corn, berries and squash grown on site, plus other BC fruit and preserves. The seasonal sunflower festival and pumpkin patch draw crowds, and the market closes over winter.
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