Cafés
A genuinely small-batch roaster and tasting room off Lansdowne Road, run more like a workshop than a cafe. Limited seating, rotating single origins and staff happy to talk through the roast. Closed Wednesdays, so check before making the trip.
Lansdowne Road is not an obvious address for a coffee roaster. The stretch is mostly institutional and residential, with campus traffic from Kwantlen, low-rise apartments and playing fields, and a small-batch roasting operation with a tasting room sits oddly on it in a good way.
The place runs more like a workshop than a cafe. Single origins rotate, and the staff will talk through what a roast is actually doing to a bean if that is a conversation you want to have. Go expecting a counter conversation rather than a couch and two hours of wifi.
Richmond's cafe scene is enormous and mostly it is not about the coffee. Dessert cafes, bubble tea counters and study spots dominate it, they are good at what they do, and the number of places in this city seriously roasting their own beans stays small. That makes a roaster a deliberate errand rather than somewhere you fall into on the way past.
City Centre is easy to reach on the Canada Line and everything around Lansdowne is flat and walkable, so a stop here slots into a day of other errands without much effort. The area is also changing quickly. The blocks between here and Lansdowne station are being rebuilt with towers, and the residential population arriving with them is the kind that will support a shop selling beans by origin rather than by the pound. One roaster in a city of several hundred milk tea counters is a small correction, and worth using while it is here.
In the City Centre neighbourhood of Richmond.
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Other cafés and nearby businesses in the Richmond directory.
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Airy independent cafe just north of Richmond Centre with hours that stretch to 10pm, which is rare in the neighborhood. Popular with students and evening study groups wanting espresso, matcha and a table long after other cafes have closed.
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