Bakeries
Richmond's kosher bakery, family-run and Filipino-Jewish, turning out challah, cinnamon rolls, croissants, muffins and donuts. The hours are short and it closes Saturdays, so plan around them. Bread is baked fresh rather than held over.
Keeping kosher in Richmond means planning ahead, because the certified options in this part of the region are few and spread thin. A bakery working in that space fills a real need, and not only for the households that keep kosher strictly. Anyone who wants challah on a Friday without driving over to Oak Street has an interest in it too, and so does anyone who has tried to source specific baked goods for a holiday at short notice.
Blundell Road at Garden City Road is a genuinely useful piece of Richmond that gets almost no attention. The plaza on that corner is a mid-century strip mall with a wide surface lot, the sort of place people in the surrounding blocks treat as an errand run rather than a destination. Nobody drives across the city for it. Everybody who lives near it uses it weekly.
A specialist bakery makes more sense in that setting than it would in a food-court mall, because the trade is people who already know what they came for and have somewhere to be afterwards. Small bakeries also run on a rhythm set by the oven rather than by a retail clock, so mornings are the productive time to turn up and a phone call beats a hopeful drive across town. The surrounding blocks are Blundell and Broadmoor: single-family streets, schools, playing fields, and a population that has been doing its shopping in the same lot for decades. It is one of the least glamorous corners of the city and one of the most used.
In the Blundell neighbourhood of Richmond.
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Other bakeries and nearby businesses in the Richmond directory.
A neighborhood Chinese bakery of about a decade's standing at No. 2 and Blundell, run on self-serve tongs and trays behind glass. Pizza buns, mousse cake slices and moon cakes in season; whole cakes need a day's notice. Free lot parking outside.
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The Richmond branch of the Chinatown institution, best known for steamed baos in more than a dozen fillings alongside egg tarts, buns and apple tarts. It sits steps from Brighouse station, which makes it an easy stop straight off the Canada Line.
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A long-running Cantonese bakery near Brighouse station where you grab a tray and tongs and load up from self-serve shelves. Portuguese egg tarts, pineapple buns, pork buns and sausage rolls come out through the day, and it stays open until 9pm. Cash only.
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An old-school Chinese bakery on Westminster Highway where prices have barely moved. Honey cakes, plain buns, butter cookies dipped in chocolate and some of the cheapest egg tarts in the city. Selection changes daily and thins out late in the afternoon.
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A tiny Japanese-French cake studio on Alexandra Road, open Thursday to Sunday only. Chiffon-based entremets and choux in flavours like matcha yuzu, restrained on sugar and finished carefully. The popular ones sell out, so it is worth calling first.
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An Asian bakery on Alexandra Road built around softball-sized meat floss cakes, savoury cream inside and floss outside, in flavours running from seaweed and salted egg yolk to Oreo chocolate and lemon yogurt. Unusual enough to draw people across town.
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From the blog
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