Grocery Stores
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.
Precision is the reason to make this trip rather than buying Japanese ingredients at a general supermarket. If a recipe calls for a particular miso or a specific rice, the gap between the right one and the near-enough one is real, and general stores stock the near-enough one. Darumaya is a proper grocer rather than a snack shop, carrying baking and cooking ingredients, wagyu and sashimi-grade fish, and regional snacks that never make it into wide distribution.
Staff move between Japanese and English without any fuss, which matters when you are trying to identify a particular flour or work out what a given cut is actually for. That conversation is the difference between leaving with the right thing and leaving with something that looked similar on the shelf.
McClelland Road sits in West Cambie, the pocket north of Cambie Road that has filled in over the past couple of decades with mid-rise housing and the retail that follows it. It is a short drive from the Golden Village and a world away in feel, lower and newer and much more residential. The streets are quiet enough that the shop reads as a neighborhood fixture, even though people cross the city to get to it.
There is a hot food counter as well, which turns a grocery run into lunch without much resistance. Anyone shopping for the ingredients to one dish tends to end up eating a different one on the spot. That is a reasonable way to spend an hour on this side of the city, and it costs nothing to look at what is in the case before you decide.
In the West Cambie neighbourhood of Richmond.
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Other grocery stores and nearby businesses in the Richmond directory.
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