Chilliwack guide
Chilliwack eats in three separate places, and only one of them is obvious
The drive-throughs on Luckakuck are the visible half of eating here. The interesting half is downtown, out on the farm roads, and in the strip plazas nobody photographs.
Written by Warren Kroeker
If you come off Highway 1 hungry and turn onto Luckakuck Way, you will form a particular impression of eating in Chilliwack, and it will be wrong. That strip is the national half of the city's food economy: the drive-throughs, the franchise dining rooms, the fast-casual counters. It is the visible half because it is the half built where the traffic is.
The rest of it is in three places, none of which announce themselves.
The downtown, which has changed
The blocks around Five Corners now hold the highest concentration of independent kitchens in Chilliwack, and most of that has happened recently. District 1881, built on the old Chilliwack Cattle Sales site, brought a run of newer rooms in beside the heritage storefronts on Wellington Avenue and Yale Road.
This is also the part of town where the buildings help. Several of these rooms are in century-old commercial premises with high ceilings and deep frontages, which is not something a strip plaza can do at any price.
The Vedder Road plazas
The single greatest number of dining rooms in Chilliwack is along Vedder Road through Sardis and Vedder, and almost all of it is easy to drive past. These are strip-plaza rooms — a sushi counter, a Vietnamese kitchen, a pizza shop, a pub — sharing a parking lot with a dentist and a nail salon.
The south end of that run is propped up by something specific: Canada Education Park, which holds the University of the Fraser Valley's Chilliwack campus, the RCMP Pacific Region Training Centre and a Justice Institute of BC campus. Several thousand students and trainees at one end of a road does noticeable things to the density of cheap, good food near it.
The farm roads
Chilliwack has more farmland than any other community in the Lower Mainland — better than 17,000 hectares, more than 700 farms, close to 30 per cent of the city's economic activity. It is the largest dairy-producing area in British Columbia. That shows up on a plate more than people expect.
The obvious version is seasonal: the roadside stands through Greendale, Rosedale and Yarrow that open with the corn in August, and the farm-gate ice cream that only makes sense because the milk did not travel far. The less obvious version is the baking. The Mennonite settlement at Yarrow from February 1928 onward brought a tradition that never left the valley, and its descendants are still on counters in Yarrow, Sardis and the downtown.
A note on what is not listed
This directory does not carry national chains, which removes a large fraction of what is physically available to eat in Chilliwack. That is deliberate. You do not need a local directory to find the drive-through on Luckakuck Way; you need one to find the two-table place in a Sardis plaza that has been quietly excellent for eleven years.
Who wrote this
Warren Kroeker
Warren Kroeker grew up in Yarrow and lives in Garrison Crossing, on the ground where the army base used to be. He has been writing about Chilliwack businesses since the malls were the only thing anyone talked about.
