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Morning fog lifting off the Colony Farm flats, the Fraser sloughs silver under a grey sky in Port Coquitlam BC

Written on the ground here

Find a Port Coquitlam business, from Mary Hill to the river

The shops, kitchens and trades of the river-and-rail city — Mary Hill to Colony Farm, Shaughnessy Street to the Traboulay loop.

Neighbourhoods
5
Categories
8

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Find what you need

These are the categories I cover in Port Coquitlam, each one carrying a live count of what is in it. The food categories are the biggest, which will surprise nobody who lives here.

Food & Drink in Port Coquitlam BC

Food and drink is the widest section of any local directory and usually the reason someone opens one. It covers everywhere you can sit down for a meal, pick something up on the way home, or restock a cupboard: full-service restaurants and quick counters, coffee bars, bakeries and dessert shops, pubs and taprooms, grocers, liquor stores, and the corner shops that stay open after everything else on the block has closed. The subcategories split the section along the lines people actually search. Someone booking a Saturday dinner and someone hunting a bag of rice at nine at night are not doing the same task, and one blended list serves neither. Each subcategory keeps its own listings, its own map and its own neighbourhood filters. Every listing shows address, phone, website and posted hours wherever the business has published them, with a short description of what the place actually is rather than a line lifted from a brochure. Businesses that genuinely straddle two subcategories, a bakery with a full café menu, a brewery with a kitchen, appear in both, with one marked primary so the breadcrumb trail and the structured data stay consistent.

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Shopping in Port Coquitlam BC

Retail is the part of a local economy that people miss only once it has gone. This section covers the shops you can walk into: florists, pet stores, hardware and garden centres, furniture and home goods, clothing, shoes and jewellery, books, toys, sporting goods, bikes, electronics, music, phones and the department stores that still anchor a mall. The organising principle is what you are shopping for, not who owns the business. A national chain and a forty-year-old independent sit in the same list and carry the same fields, and neither is pushed up the page for paying us: nothing on this site is a paid placement. Listings show address, phone, website and posted hours, plus the neighbourhood, which is the filter most people want: retail is an errand, and errands are geographic. Where a shop offers something that changes whether the trip is worth making, repairs, rentals, custom orders, delivery, in-store pickup, the listing says so rather than leaving you to phone and ask.

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Beauty & Personal Care in Port Coquitlam BC

Personal care is a relationship business. Most people find one hairdresser, one nail technician or one barber and stay with them for years, which means the search that brings someone here is usually a first visit or a move to a new part of town: and both are decisions people want to get right. This section covers hair salons, barbershops, nail salons, day spas and tattoo studios. Each subcategory holds its own listings with address, phone, website and posted hours, plus the neighbourhood, because proximity genuinely matters when an appointment is a monthly habit rather than a one-off. Booking practice varies enormously across these trades: some businesses are appointment-only, some take walk-ins, some run an online booking system and some still work a paper book at the desk. Where a business publishes how it prefers to be booked, the listing says so and links to the booking page where one exists. No listing here is a paid placement, and no rating is published unless it comes from real, verifiable data.

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Health in Port Coquitlam BC

The health section lists local practices and clinics people need to find quickly: dentists, medical clinics and doctors, optometrists, pharmacies and veterinarians. Most searches here are practical rather than exploratory: a clinic accepting new patients, a pharmacy still open, an eye exam this week, a dentist for a tooth that has started to hurt. Listings show address, phone, website and posted hours plus the neighbourhood. Where a practice publishes it, the listing notes whether new patients are being accepted, whether appointments can be booked online, and whether walk-in service is available : the three questions that decide almost every search in this section. Nothing in this directory is medical advice, and no listing here is an endorsement or a credential check. Practitioner registration in British Columbia is a matter of public record with the relevant regulatory college, and verifying it is always worth the two minutes. For anything urgent, contact HealthLink BC at 8-1-1 or emergency services at 9-1-1.

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Automotive in Port Coquitlam BC

Everything to do with keeping a vehicle on the road: repair and maintenance shops, new and used dealerships, tire specialists and car washes. It is a category where a bad choice is expensive and a good shop gets kept for fifteen years, so the information that matters is specific: what the shop actually works on, whether it is certified, and whether it can take the car this week. Listings show address, phone, website and posted hours plus the neighbourhood. Where a business publishes it, the listing notes appointment and drop-off arrangements, courtesy or loaner vehicles, shuttle service, and whether after-hours key drop is available. Automotive businesses cluster into a handful of areas in most cities, highway frontage, light-industrial blocks and auto malls, rather than spreading evenly, which makes the neighbourhood filter unusually useful here. No listing in this section is a paid placement, and no rating is shown unless it comes from real, verifiable data.

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Professional Services in Port Coquitlam BC

The advisers and offices people deal with a few times a year and remember for a decade: real estate agents and brokerages, insurance brokers, accountants and bookkeepers, lawyers and notaries, and bank and credit union branches. These are appointment businesses rather than walk-in ones, and the questions people ask are different from the rest of the directory. Not just where and when, but what this office actually handles, whether a first consultation costs anything, and whether they take on work of your size at all. Listings show address, phone, website and posted hours plus the neighbourhood. Where a firm publishes it, the listing notes areas of practice, whether consultations are free, whether remote or virtual appointments are offered, and which languages are spoken at the office: the last of these matters more in this section than almost anywhere else. Nothing in this directory is legal, financial, tax or insurance advice, and a listing is not a recommendation. Professional licensing in British Columbia is publicly searchable through the relevant regulator, and it is always worth checking.

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Home Services in Port Coquitlam BC

Trades and services that come to the property: electricians, roofers, landscapers and lawn care, general contractors, locksmiths, movers, cleaning companies, pest control and self-storage. These businesses are found differently from every other section of the directory. Many work from a yard, a unit in an industrial block or a truck rather than a storefront, so the address is often an office rather than somewhere to visit, and the service area matters more than the pin on the map. Where a company publishes the areas it covers, the listing carries that instead of implying it only works on its own street. Listings show phone, website and posted hours plus the neighbourhood the business is based in. Where published, the listing notes whether free estimates are given, whether emergency or after-hours call-out is available, and whether the company is licensed, bonded and insured. For any work requiring a permit or a trade qualification, ask for licence and insurance details in writing before work starts. It is a normal request and a reputable contractor will expect it.

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Things To Do in Port Coquitlam BC

The section for everything that does not fit a trade heading: gyms and fitness studios, yoga, hotels and places to stay, childcare and daycare, schools and tutoring, dry cleaners and photographers. Some of it is what you do with a free afternoon and some of it is the standing arrangement that makes the week work, and both belong in a directory people actually use. Listings show address, phone, website and posted hours plus the neighbourhood. Where a business publishes it, the listing notes booking and registration practice, whether drop-ins or trials are available, and whether there is a waitlist: which is the deciding factor in several of these categories rather than a footnote. Community centres, public pools, arenas and library branches are civic facilities rather than businesses and are not listed as such, though they are often the right answer and are linked from the articles where they belong. No listing here is a paid placement, and no rating appears unless it comes from real, verifiable data.

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Why this directory

About Port Coquitlam

A directory is only worth anything if somebody keeps it honest. Here is what I actually do about that.

Port Coquitlam sits at the hinge of Metro Vancouver's northeast corner, wedged between the Coquitlam River and the Pitt River with the Fraser along its southern edge. It grew up around the CPR roundhouse, and the mainline still runs straight through the middle of town; the city has been a railway place for over a century, and the heritage strip on Shaughnessy Street is what survived of the original core.

Today PoCo is best known to outsiders for the Traboulay Trail, the roughly 25-kilometre loop that circles the whole city along riverbanks, dikes and greenbelts. The directory covers the city the trail goes around: the downtown blocks, the Mary Hill bench, the Lincoln and Glenwood streets, and the river-side land down to Colony Farm. National chains are not listed.

What makes this different

Checked, not scraped

Every entry starts from an address I can find, a phone number that rings and hours somebody confirmed. When a place closes, it comes off. Plenty of directories are still sending people to restaurants that shut years ago, and I think that is a rotten thing to do to somebody driving across town on a Sunday.

The whole city, not one strip

All 5 Port Coquitlam neighbourhoods have a page here, Central and Coquitlam River included, and every listing tells you which one it sits in. Most directories learn one strip of town and guess at the rest. The parts they skip are usually where I eat.

Free to list, quick to fix

Being listed costs nothing, and that is not a launch offer. Owners can claim their page, correct the hours, add a website, and I get to it that week. There are no tiers and no ad slots, so nobody here climbs over anybody else by paying me. My parents sold produce out of a stall, and I know what a rigged aisle looks like.

I'm a local

One person writes this site and that person is Fern Kellaway. I eat in Port Coquitlam most days and I walk it most mornings, so the guides come with opinions attached. Where I would pick one place over a near identical one down the road, I say which and why. Where I have not been since the owners changed, the page admits it.

Neighbourhoods

Browse by where you are

Every neighbourhood in Port Coquitlam has its own page, the waterfront end and the farm roads included. I use these pages more than I use the search box.

A gravel bar on the Coquitlam River below the trail embankment, the far bank low and out of focus in Port Coquitlam BC

PoCo gets described as the place you drive through between Coquitlam and Pitt Meadows, which is like describing a house by its hallway. The city has its own downtown, its own river, its own trail loop, and most of its own economy.

Fern Kellaway, Editor in Port Coquitlam BC Fern Kellaway Editor, Port Coquitlam Local More about Fern Kellaway
Fern Kellaway, Editor in Port Coquitlam BC

Editor, Fern Kellaway

Written by someone who lives here

I grew up in Mary Hill, on the bench above the rail corridor. My grandfather worked the CPR yards, and the roundhouse history is not nostalgia to me, it is family furniture. Port Coquitlam has been a railway town since before it was a city, and a lot of how it still works makes more sense once you know that.

I live near Lions Park now, close enough to the Coquitlam River that the trail is my default walk. The Traboulay loop goes around the whole city, roughly 25 kilometres of it, and twenty years of walking sections of it means I have watched businesses open, struggle and close from the sidewalk level, which is the level this directory works at.

This site exists because searching for a local business in PoCo usually returns a national lead-generation page with a Vancouver phone number and nothing checked. I wanted a list of businesses that are actually here, written by somebody who knows the difference between Mary Hill and Glenwood and would notice if a listing were wrong.

  • Lives near Lions Park
  • Grew up in Mary Hill
  • Third generation in PoCo
  • Walks the Traboulay loop weekly

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Run a business in Port Coquitlam?

Listings are free and I check every one by hand, so yours is usually live within two working days. It lands in the right category and the right neighbourhood, on a page built to be found. Tell me when something changes and I will fix it that week.