Steveston in Sockeye Season: Cannery Walks and Dockside Izakaya Suppers

The sockeye are running and Steveston smells like it — salt, diesel, fish blood on the dock planks. I drove down from Vancouver proper on a Wednesday morning in July, windows down on the No. 1 Road stretch where the suburb thins out and the Fraser River delta starts doing its thing. Twenty minutes from downtown Richmond, and you're standing on a wharf watching a guy in rubber boots hose down a 900-pound haul.

People talk about Steveston like it's a quaint fishing village. It's not, really. It's a working waterfront bolted onto a suburb, and that tension is what makes eating here interesting. The canneries closed decades ago but the fleet still comes in, and a small cluster of Japanese-Canadian restaurants have turned the neighborhood into one of the best places to eat raw fish in Metro Vancouver. No contest.

1. The cannery walk you should actually do

Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site, 12138 Fourth Avenue. That's the one. Skip the Britannia Heritage Shipyard if you're short on time — it's fine for kids but the interpretive panels read like a grade-school diorama, and you'll spend more time swatting mosquitoes than learning anything.

The Gulf of Georgia building is the real deal: an 1894 salmon cannery where you can still smell the industrial grease in the floorboards. The canning line exhibit runs you through the full mechanized process, from the Iron Chink (yes, that was its actual name — the racist history is addressed, not sanitized) to the retort ovens. Adult admission is $9.80 CAD. Budget about 90 minutes.

What got me was the upstairs gallery on the Japanese-Canadian fishing families who built Steveston and then got interned in 1942, their boats confiscated and sold. The photos up there are devastating. One wall has a ledger showing what the government paid fishermen for seized vessels — fractions of their value. You walk out of that room and onto the boardwalk where boats are still tied up, and the continuity hits different.

2. Buying fish off the boats

Fisherman's Wharf at the foot of No. 1 Road is where the independent boats sell direct. Sockeye salmon, whole and gill-netted, going for roughly $12–$18 CAD per fish depending on the day's catch and size. Cash preferred. The sellers are actual fishermen — some days nobody's there, some days there are six boats lined up.

I made the mistake of showing up at 3 p.m. on a Saturday once and everything was picked over. Go before 11 a.m.

3. Ichiro Izakaya, or: the best unagi don in the Lower Mainland

Here's my contrarian take: Steveston's most famous restaurant, Pajo's, is fine for what it is — fried fish on a dock — but people line up 40 minutes for halibut and chips that taste like every other halibut and chips on the B.C. coast. Skip it. The thing worth crossing town for is Ichiro Japanese Restaurant, 3986 Bayview Street.

It doesn't look like much from outside. Small room, maybe 30 seats, fluorescent-adjacent lighting. The kind of place where the menu is laminated and the sashimi is extraordinary. Their unagi don — freshwater eel lacquered and broiled, served over rice — is $22 CAD and genuinely the best version I've had west of Toronto's Japantown. The eel has that specific char on the edges, almost burnt-sugar bitter, and the tare sauce underneath is thick enough to coat the rice without drowning it.

Order the assorted sashimi plate if the sockeye is listed. During season, they source directly from the wharf. You can taste the difference — firmer, almost metallic in the way that only just-caught salmon is. Dinner service starts at 5 p.m. and the room fills fast on weekends. No reservations for parties under four, last I checked.

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4. Walking Moncton Street without buying a candle

Moncton Street is Steveston's main commercial strip, and it's got the expected mix: ice cream shops, boutiques selling driftwood art, a bookstore. A lot of it is the same coastal-town retail you've seen in Tofino, Lunenburg, every harbour town that figured out tourists have wallets.

What's worth your time: the Steveston Museum at 3811 Moncton Street (free admission, small but focused on the fishing community's history) and Timothy's Frozen Yogurt, which has been there since the '80s and makes a solid mango soft-serve for $5 CAD. Walk east on Moncton until it dead-ends at the boardwalk, then turn south toward Garry Point Park. That transition — strip mall to river mouth — takes about four minutes on foot.

5. Garry Point at golden hour

This is the payoff. Garry Point Park sits at the southwestern tip of Richmond where the Fraser's south arm opens into the Strait of Georgia. Flat grass, wind, kite fliers, and a Japanese fishermen's memorial made of river stone.

Last time I was there in late July, I sat on the rocks near the memorial eating an onigiri from Steveston's 7-Eleven (don't judge — B.C. 7-Elevens carry surprisingly decent Japanese rice balls) and watched a freighter slide past toward the port. The light at 8:30 p.m. turns everything copper. Planes descending into YVR across the water.

6. One more meal before you leave

If Ichiro is the izakaya dinner, then Kisamos is the wildcard lunch. Greek restaurant at 3400 Moncton Street, owned by a family that's been in Steveston for decades. The lamb souvlaki plate runs about $19 CAD and comes with potatoes that have the kind of crisp edges you get from someone who actually watches the oven. Not what you'd expect from a fishing village, which is sort of the point.

Or go back to the wharf and grab a bag of spot prawns if the season overlaps (it sometimes does, late June). Boil them in salt water for 90 seconds, nothing else. The tail meat is sweet enough to make you angry at every frozen prawn you've ever eaten.

Steveston doesn't need a full weekend. A long day — cannery in the morning, fish off the boats, lunch, park at sunset, izakaya dinner — covers it. Bring the cooler.

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