Cafés
A long-running Richmond independent that brews ethically sourced coffee to order and bakes its own cakes and pastries in house. Tucked into a strip mall on No. 3 Road, it keeps a steady weekday crowd of regulars who know the baristas.
A strip mall on No. 3 Road is an unpromising address for an independent cafe, and Fresh Press has made one work anyway. Coffee is brewed to order from ethically sourced beans, and the cakes and pastries are baked in house rather than trucked in. On a weekday morning the room reads exactly as a neighborhood cafe should, with the same faces, a lot of laptops, and conversations that pick up halfway through.
Independent coffee has a harder time in this city than across the river, and the reason is structural rather than cultural. Richmond is built around plazas and arterials, so there is no high street where a small cafe catches foot traffic simply by existing. Anything independent has to become a destination for somebody. That is a higher bar than it sounds, and clearing it is the genuinely interesting thing about this place.
No. 3 Road puts you within easy reach of both Brighouse and Lansdowne stations, so the Canada Line is a real option rather than a technicality. The better use of the room is as a working spot or a meeting point rather than a grab-and-go, because the appeal is that it is calm and the coffee is made properly rather than made fast. Anyone who has spent a morning trying to work in a mall food court will understand the difference immediately. Arrive with something to do and an hour in which to do it.
In the City Centre neighbourhood of Richmond.
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