Ice Cream & Dessert
A walk-up treat shop at the corner of Third Avenue and Bayview serving soft serve, flavoured slushes and the two swirled together. Cheap and fast, and positioned exactly where you want it after walking the Steveston boardwalk past the cannery.
Small legs stop walking at roughly this corner, and somebody noticed. Come up off the Steveston boardwalk past the cannery, cross onto Third Avenue at Bayview, and there is a walk-up window waiting at the exact point where a family walk runs out of momentum. The location does a great deal of the work, and that is meant as a compliment.
Soft serve and slush swirled together is the order that separates the adults from the children, and the children are correct. It is fast, it is cold, and it makes no attempt to be gelato. Richmond has fancier ice cream if that is what you want. A window like this is not competing with any of it, and pretending otherwise would ruin the thing that makes it work.
The village in July is a crowd, and the queue at a walk-up window rises and falls with the flow of people coming off the dyke and the wharf. Late afternoon is the peak. Late morning is calm, and a wet weekday in February is a different town altogether. Everything in Steveston sits within a five-minute walk of everything else, which is the other reason this address works. Nobody drives here specifically; they arrive on foot at the end of something else. Aim for the streets up around Chatham or Second, because the ones nearest the water fill first and stay full through the summer.
In the Steveston neighbourhood of Richmond.
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Other ice cream and dessert shops and nearby businesses in the Richmond directory.
A gelato and dessert shop on Moncton Street in the middle of Steveston Village, and a fairly recent addition to the strip. Cases of gelato by the scoop plus other sweets, positioned squarely for the summer walk-up crowd off the boardwalk.
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A Steveston Village counter serving homemade ice cream by the scoop a couple of blocks from the water. It shares a building with another independent ice cream shop, which makes tasting your way between the two an easy afternoon detour.
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A Steveston Landing gelato parlour making small-batch Italian gelato in house from fresh local ingredients, alongside frozen yogurt. Classic flavours sit beside originals, and the waterfront location is why the line stretches on summer evenings.
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A Second Avenue scoop shop in Steveston Village with a broad range of ice cream and sorbet including local makers, plus bubble waffles, bubble tea and shakes. Picnic tables outside, prices below the tourist strip, and open until 9pm in summer.
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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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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.
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From the blog
Longer reads from the editor, with the places worth a detour linked inside them.
The West Dyke Trail is about five and a half kilometres of flat gravel between Terra Nova Rural Park and Garry Point, and I ride it most mornings. Here is what is actually at the north end, which way to walk so the wind is on your side, and why winter is the better season for it.
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Richmond BC has far more park than people realize, and a lot of it is a gravel path with no washroom. Here is my working list of the ones that actually hold up with kids, ranked by parking, toilets, wind off the Strait and how far you are from a snack when it all goes wrong.
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The Richmond Maritime Festival takes over Britannia Shipyards on the BC Day long weekend, and Steveston fills right up. What the festival actually is, why you should not try to park at the site, and how I would spend the other two days of the three.
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