San Jose’s Little Saigon Gets Its First Night Market

For many Bay Area food lovers, it has been cold boba summer, a hot-dog-at-the-Ballers’-game summer and, perhaps more than anything, a summer of bustling outdoor night markets. West Oakland recently kicked off a food-centric, thrillingly multicultural monthly night market. San Francisco’s Sunset district will reprise a super-sized version of its popular Irving Street night market in August and September, featuring as many as 150 vendors.

And now, for the first time, Eastside San Jose is getting its own night market: the Story Road Night Market, a heavily Vietnamese-focused event located in the Grand Century Mall parking lot. There, right in the heart of Little Saigon, food vendors will grill meat skewers and ladle out cups of cold chè while retail pop-ups sell trading cards, scented candles and handmade plushies — all amid a full lineup of cultural performances.

Co-produced by San Jose street food event organizer Moveable Feast, the new night market will debut this weekend, July 26–27, with later editions scheduled for September and October.

Like many of the other Bay Area night market events, Story Road Night Market draws its inspiration from the lively late-night street markets that are a staple in cities throughout Asia. Ryan Sebastian, Moveable Feast’s founder and CEO, says his company’s night markets differ from its more standard, Off the Grid–style food truck events in terms of their larger scale and later hours, and also their inclusion of non-food retail vendors, many of which are part of San Jose’s vibrant pop-up maker community. It might not be quite as sprawling and idiosyncratic as your average Taipei night market, but, as Sebastian puts it, “It’s not just eight food trucks in a parking lot.”

Not all of the food vendors will be Vietnamese, or even Asian American, necessarily. There will also be food trucks slinging birria tacos and Nashville hot chicken sandwiches. But one of the virtues of the night market’s tighter cultural focus is the sheer variety of Vietnamese foods that will be on offer — not just the most famous dishes like phở and bánh mì, says Moveable Feast events manager Yaneth Lopez, but also other street food dishes that “go great with beer.” (There will be a beer garden on the premises, after all.)

Here’s where the location right outside Grand Century — a nearly all-Vietnamese shopping mall — really sets the night market apart. About a third of the food stalls will be occupied by traditional Vietnamese restaurants from the food court or the adjacent Vietnam Town shopping plaza.

So, on the one hand, Story Road Night Market visitors will be able to partake in the kind of trendy, hybridized food that you usually find at this kind of event: Portuguese egg tarts with Asian flavors like pandan and durian from A&M Patisserie, Filipino-Mexican fusion tacos from Los Kuyas and, of course, artisanal chili crunch.

At the same time, Grand Century food court staple Cháo Vịt Thanh Đa will be grilling skewered meat, snails and squid, perfuming the air with their enticing, smoky aroma. Ăn Vặt Nhà Cam, a newcomer to Vietnam Town, will be on hand to sell, among other dishes, chicken feet in Thai sauce. Meanwhile, longtime farmers market pop-up darling Hết Sẩy straddles the old and new, serving hard-to-find regional specialties from the Mekong River Delta, often with a Bay Area twist. At the night market, they’ll be serving their signature bánh mì thịt kho tàu, a sandwich filled with braised pork belly, chopped egg, pickled mustard greens and bird’s eye chilies. They’ll also be one of a couple vendors selling chè, the dessert beverage made up of shaved ice and assorted fruits and jellies — the ideal summer refresher.

“The cool thing about having the vendors outside is you can actually see them making these things instead of just reading them on a menu,” says Natalie Truong, Moveable Feast’s catering and operations specialist. In other words, for visitors who aren’t already intimately familiar with Vietnamese cuisine, it will be a relatively unintimidating chance to try something new.

Sebastian says the Bay Area’s current night market renaissance can trace its roots back to the height of the pandemic, when all big community gatherings were shut down completely. As it turns out, night markets have been one of the best responses to the “need to establish community connection and combat loneliness,” he says. Meanwhile, as cities and neighborhoods launched successful night market events, everyone in the world of city economic development has been watching and learning. The upshot? Companies like Moveable Feast have been inundated with requests from cities that want to put money into launching a night market — more requests than they have the capacity to fulfill, Sebastian says.

In fact, the Story Road Night Market series came about because of one such request: San Jose District 7 Councilmember Bien Doan reached out to Moveable Feast after raising some money to help fund the night market, and the newly formed Story Road Business Association also chipped in — all with the goal of building community, drawing new visitors to the district and creating some buzz.

“Little Saigon, it’s already known for its food,” Sebastian says. And if all goes according to plan, the night market should make a convincing case to newcomers for what most folks who live in San Jose already know — that this little half-mile stretch of Story Road has one of the greatest concentrations of delicious food in the entire Bay Area.

Story Road Night Market will take place on Friday, July 26, and Saturday, July 27, from 4–10 p.m., in the Grand Century Mall’s (1111 Story Rd., San Jose) western parking lot — the side adjacent to Vietnam Town. Both parking and admission are free. The market will take place again Sept. 6–7 and Oct. 11–12.