Fast Food & Takeout
An Osaka-style curry house on No. 1 Road in Steveston, blending more than twenty spices for its roux. Katsu is breaded and fried to order, and the curry ramen is unusual enough to be worth trying. Counter ordering, quick service, generous portions.
Wednesday dinner in Steveston does not happen down at the boardwalk. That end is busy, seasonal and full of people who drove in for the day. The No. 1 Road plazas are where the neighborhood actually eats. Oretachi trades from that stretch, cooking Japanese curry in the Osaka style, and the distinction is worth understanding if you live on this side of the city, because the two halves of Steveston run on completely different calendars.
Japanese curry is comfort food with a specific texture. Thick, dark, faintly sweet, closer to a gravy than to anything called curry in the South Asian sense, and built on a roux rather than on fresh aromatics. Richmond has enough Japanese restaurants that people forget curry houses are their own category, separate from sushi counters and from ramen shops. A dedicated curry kitchen lives on its roux and on how well it fries, and both are things a first visit tells you plainly.
This works better as a real dinner than as a snack. Curry is heavy food and the format is quick rather than lingering. It suits a weeknight, a cold evening, or the end of a long walk on the dyke far better than it suits a leisurely night out with a table booked. The plazas along No. 1 Road are also easier to get in and out of than anywhere near the village core, which is most of the reason locals default to this end after dark.
In the Steveston neighbourhood of Richmond.
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From the blog
Longer reads from the editor, with the places worth a detour linked inside them.
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