Ice Cream & Dessert
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.
J Squared makes its own ice cream in rotating batches, which is the whole proposition and also the catch. A flavour you liked may not be there next time. That is either the appeal or the frustration depending on temperament, and it is the honest trade for a kitchen small enough to change its mind every week rather than committing to a permanent lineup.
Small-batch ice cream in this city skews Asian in flavour, and that is not a novelty position here. It is what the market wants. Black sesame, Thai milk tea, Vietnamese coffee and ube are the flavours people in Richmond actually order, in the same way a shop in another town would have to get its vanilla right before anything else. The test is whether the flavour is doing something. Black sesame should be savoury with a bitter edge rather than sweet with grey coloring stirred through it.
The address is on Blundell Road, well east of No. 3 Road in the flatter, quieter part of central Richmond where housing takes over from commerce. Blundell is a residential east-west route with plazas at the main intersections and very little reason to stop between them, so this is a destination rather than something you pass on the way to somewhere else. Buying to take home makes more sense than eating on the spot for that reason. Dense ice cream survives a car ride far better than a soft scoop, and there is nowhere especially pleasant to stand around on that stretch anyway.
In the Blundell neighbourhood of Richmond.
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Other ice cream and dessert shops and nearby businesses in the Richmond directory.
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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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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