Grocery Stores
Over 10,000 square feet of Japanese goods on Alderbridge Way, most of it imported directly. Bento, sushi and hot food made in-house each morning, plus frozen fish, seasonings, cosmetics and kitchenware. It closes at 6pm, so go earlier than you think.
Seasonings and kitchenware are the real reason to make this trip, more than the prepared food counter is. Both are genuinely hard to replace elsewhere in the city, and both need floor space that a supermarket's Japanese section will never give them. Izumiya has that space on Alderbridge Way, and it stocks to an importer's range rather than a grocery chain's, which shows up in breadth rather than in any single item.
Alderbridge runs between Westminster Highway and Cambie through the middle of the City Centre, and it has become the street where Richmond puts businesses that need real square footage. Big-format retail, warehouses converted into showrooms, the occasional civic building. It is not a walking street in any pleasant sense, though Lansdowne station is a reasonable distance on foot if you are not carrying much home afterwards.
Prepared food and pantry stock are really two separate errands, and treating them as one is how people end up disappointed. What sits on a hot counter turns over through the day. A shelf of imported seasonings does not. Anybody restocking a kitchen properly does better going deliberately than tacking it onto the end of something else. Richmond shopping habits are calibrated to the big Asian supermarkets, which carry a bit of everything and stay open late, and a specialty importer works on a narrower model than that. The trade is depth in one direction for convenience in another.
In the City Centre neighbourhood of Richmond.
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Other grocery stores and nearby businesses in the Richmond directory.
An older, no-frills Park Road supermarket that has outlasted flashier neighbors. Free parking, narrow aisles, and a genuinely pan-Asian shelf mix, with Chinese, Filipino, Malaysian and Indonesian pantry items sitting side by side at fair prices.
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The Vancouver chain's largest store, about 19,000 square feet on Garden City Road and open 8:30am to 10pm daily. Straightforward Chinese-Canadian grocery shopping: fresh meat and seafood counters, stacked produce, bulk dry goods and sauces.
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A busy Chinese supermarket in the plaza on No. 3 Road, popular for a well-stocked produce floor, a barbecue counter locals rate for leaner char siu, and bulk dace fish paste. Cashiers work fast; finding a parking spot is the only hard part.
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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.
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A mid-size Asian supermarket on Odlin Road in West Cambie, quieter than the No. 3 Road giants. Rice in every format, sauces, frozen dim sum, and a produce section priced for people cooking Chinese food at home most nights of the week.
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A big, cheap Asian supermarket off Sexsmith Road that stays open until midnight every night of the year. Locals go for aggressive produce and seafood pricing, a busy barbecue and hot-food counter, and restocking that makes late shopping worthwhile.
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