Ice Cream & Dessert
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.
Nobody queues here on a Saturday night, and for a dessert shop that is close to the whole selling point. Fluffle Cafe sits at the east end of Cambie Road, well outside the Golden Village cluster where shaved ice, soft serve and taiyaki all crowd within a few hundred metres of each other. Tourism Richmond includes it among the city's ice cream stops, which is the sort of mention that gets a shop noticed without getting it a lineup.
East Cambie is a different animal from the Golden Village. The buildings are lower, there are more houses than towers, the streets are wide, and it is an area people drive through on the way to the highway rather than park in for an evening out. That cuts both ways for a dessert shop. The 9780 address sits east of No. 5 Road, near where Cambie Road runs out toward the highway connections. Nothing out there is walkable, so this is a destination stop.
What strikes most people driving this side of the city is how quickly Richmond stops being dense. Two kilometres east of the towers you are in a low neighborhood with farmland behind it, and a small shop out here is serving the few thousand people who live in it rather than the whole region.
In the East Cambie neighbourhood of Richmond.
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Other ice cream and dessert shops and nearby businesses in the Richmond directory.
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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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 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.
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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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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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