I’ve lived in Vancouver my entire life, and for as long as I can remember, the Richmond Night Market was just… there.
Every summer, people would head out to Richmond to eat, shop, play games, walk around with friends and somehow spend way more money than they planned. I knew it was there. I’d been before. But I never really thought too deeply about it because I always assumed the same thing:
If I didn’t go this year, I could always go next summer.
Except now there isn’t going to be a next summer. With the Richmond Night Market closing for good, I went back one final time — and somewhere between a disappointing cheese pull, a $12 bear-shaped drink and security eventually telling us it was time to leave, I realized I probably took this place for granted.
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It Was Never Really Just About the Food
Calling this a “night market” almost undersells what it was. The way I’ve always thought about it is more like an entire night out compressed into one giant parking lot beside a casino. You could grab something to eat, wander through the stalls, play games, buy something you absolutely did not need and spend a few hours hanging out without having much of a plan.
That was probably the biggest thing I noticed during this final visit. We came in expecting to eat our way through the market, especially with more than 100 food vendors to choose from. Three hours later, it was already 10 PM and I realized we really hadn’t eaten that much.
We were just having too much fun doing everything else.
And maybe that’s what made the Richmond Night Market different from a normal food festival. You didn’t need everybody in your group to want the same thing. One person could be looking for food, somebody else could be eyeing a plushie, another person could be shopping, and somehow you were still spending the night together.
The Food Was Expensive, Weird and Very Night Market
Of course, food was still a huge part of the night, and this place has always been very good at selling things that make you stop and ask, “What is that?”
One of the first things that caught my attention was a $13 pastry shaped like a Canadian loonie. The big selling point was supposed to be an absurd cheese pull, the kind you see stretched across the entire screen in promotional videos. Ours barely made it out of the pastry at first.
Taste-wise, it basically reminded me of a Pizza Pop. That isn’t necessarily an insult — as a broken millennial, I actually like Pizza Pops — but for $13, I was expecting a little more. We eventually did get a proper cheese pull out of it, which somehow made the whole thing feel slightly more worth it. It was fun once, but probably not something I’d buy again.
That price also reminded me how different the Richmond Night Market is from the street-food markets people often associate with Asia. There, the appeal can be trying a bunch of cheap snacks without thinking too much about the cost. Here, it really does not take much to spend a lot of money.
The $6 Surprise
Earlier in the night, someone recognized me and asked a question I probably should have had an answer to: what are the good deals at the night market?
I had absolutely no idea.
Apparently cheap food has somehow become part of my branding, so I started paying more attention. The cheapest thing I could find at the time was a $6 cheese tart, and I genuinely wasn’t expecting much.
It ended up being one of the better surprises of the night. The matcha version had a much bolder flavour than I expected, while the tart shell was extremely crispy. The original was super cheesy too. Compared with the pricing across the rest of the market, $6 actually felt pretty reasonable.
We did accidentally drop some matcha filling onto the table at one point, and there was a brief moment where I became suspicious that a piece may have somehow found its way back into my tart.
At that point, it was probably better not to think too hard about how clean a night market table is.
Sometimes You’re Paying for the Memory
The other purchase that perfectly summed up the experience was a $12 tropical drink served inside one of those bear-shaped bottles with a little lanyard.
I kept seeing people carrying them around the market and eventually decided I needed one too. The drink itself was fine — basically a mango juice — and $12 might be the most I’ve ever paid for something like that.
But I also wasn’t really buying it just for the drink. I wanted the bear.
That sounds silly, but those are the kinds of things that make a night market feel like a night market. A regular juice suddenly becomes something you carry around for the rest of the evening and take home afterwards. The food doesn’t always need to be the greatest thing you’ve ever eaten. Sometimes the ridiculous cup is the entire point.
The People Ended Up Being the Best Part
Something else happened throughout the night that I wasn’t really expecting: I kept meeting people.
Viewers came up to say hi. I ran into other creators. We stopped to talk with people we hadn’t even arrived with. Those little interactions kept breaking up whatever “plan” I thought I had for the evening, but they also made the night a lot more fun.
That’s probably why three hours disappeared so quickly. I originally went in with this neat little food mission in my head. Find something classic. Find something novel. Find something designed to go viral.
By the end, none of that felt particularly important.
The market worked because it gave people a place to be around other people. Food and games gave you something to do, but hanging out was really the activity.
One Last $5 Takoyaki
Near closing time, some vendors started discounting whatever they had left. That was when I finally found the cheapest thing of the night: six pieces of takoyaki for $5, marked down from the regular $10.
Takoyaki feels like exactly the kind of food that belongs at a night market. It’s easy to carry around, easy to share and normally works well as one of several snacks you eat throughout the night.
The batch we got was probably around a 6 out of 10 for me. Not amazing, but for $5, I really couldn’t complain.
And looking back, that ended up feeling like a pretty fitting final meal. Nothing extravagant. Nothing life-changing. Just a familiar night market snack eaten while everything around us was beginning to shut down.
Then They Told Us We Had to Leave
I thought we’d stay for a couple of hours, eat some food, play some games and head home.
Instead, we completely lost track of time and stayed until security basically told us the night was over and we had to go.
That was the moment the whole visit started to feel different.
I don’t have some dramatic collection of lifelong memories tied to the Richmond Night Market. That’s almost the strange part. It wasn’t a place I spent every weekend or somewhere I thought about all year.
It was just always there.
And because it was always there, there was never any urgency. Growing up in Vancouver, having a huge summer night market right in our backyard just felt normal. If I missed it one year, no big deal. There would always be another summer.
There Isn’t Another Summer
That’s the part I don’t think fully hit me until this final visit.
There isn’t going to be another summer where I casually decide whether I feel like going. No more telling myself I’ll check it out next year. Something that had been part of the background of growing up around Vancouver is suddenly not going to be there anymore.
Was every food item worth the money? Definitely not. The $13 pizza coin was basically a fancy Pizza Pop. The $12 drink was mostly about owning a plastic bear. And yes, you could burn through a lot of money here very quickly.
But on my final night, those things almost stopped mattering.
What I’ll remember is wandering around with friends, getting distracted, talking to strangers, carrying that stupid bear bottle around and somehow staying until someone had to tell us to leave.
I went to the Richmond Night Market one last time because I wanted to capture what the place was like before it disappeared.
I left realizing I probably should have appreciated having it here a little sooner.
