Ice Cream & Dessert
A small Anderson Road cafe pairing gelato with matcha lattes and Vietnamese coffee. It works as a quieter City Centre dessert stop when the Golden Village dessert shops are packed, and the drinks are as much the point as the scoops.
Ordering a scoop and a drink together is the intended move here rather than a compromise. Daydreamers pairs gelato with matcha lattes and Vietnamese coffee, and the drinks carry as much of the idea as the scoops do. That combination makes more sense than it first appears. Vietnamese coffee is built on sweetened condensed milk and a slow drip, which puts it far closer to dessert than to a morning americano, and matcha occupies similar ground.
The other argument for the place is the address. Dessert in this city is largely a Golden Village activity, which on a Friday night means a wait, a full room and a lot of noise. Anderson Road is the quieter version of the same idea.
Anderson runs off Westminster Highway in City Centre, a few minutes from Brighouse Station and the Richmond Centre block but away from the main retail spine. This part of the city has changed enormously in fifteen years, going from surface parking and low-rise buildings to towers with podium retail underneath, and small independent cafes have quietly appeared in those ground floors. They tend to be found by the people living in the building above rather than by anyone searching them out.
If you are already downtown, walk. The distances look longer on a map than they feel underfoot, the blocks are flat, and arriving without having circled for a space puts you in a better frame of mind for sitting down with something cold.
In the City Centre neighbourhood of Richmond.
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Other ice cream and dessert shops and nearby businesses in the Richmond directory.
A small scoop shop off Blundell Road making its own ice cream in rotating batches, leaning Asian with black sesame, Thai milk tea, Vietnamese coffee and ube. No seating and no free samples, but the ice cream is dense and pints travel home well.
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Taiyaki and soft serve served together, a fish-shaped waffle cone filled with soft serve and toppings, on the Alexandra Road restaurant strip. It stays open to midnight, which makes it the default after-dinner stop in the Golden Village.
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An ice cream counter upstairs in Aberdeen Centre, listed in Tourism Richmond's guide to the city's frozen desserts. Being inside the mall makes it an easy stop mid-shop, and it draws the Golden Village crowd rather than Steveston day-trippers.
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A small dessert cafe on the east end of Cambie Road that Tourism Richmond includes among the city's ice cream stops. It sits well away from the Golden Village dessert cluster, serving the surrounding residential blocks, so it stays quieter.
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Organic milk soft serve topped with honeycomb, matcha syrup or sea salt, served from a counter at the McArthurGlen outlet mall on Sea Island. Lighter and less sweet than typical soft serve, open until 9pm, and a fair reason to break up an afternoon.
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A Steveston gelato shop churning artisanal batches in house with Asian-leaning flavours such as Uji matcha, Hong Kong milk tea and espresso, plus mango yuzu and strawberry rose sorbetto. The owner trained in Italy; there are dairy-free options too.
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