LA's Famous Night Market Runs Two Weekends a Year. Four Others Run Every Week.

Ask an Angeleno when night market season starts and most will say June, when the neon and the funnel cake smell return to Santa Anita Park. That's the assumption built into a decade of social feeds: night markets in LA mean 626 Night Market, and 626 Night Market means a drive out to Arcadia on a circled calendar weekend.

Here's what that assumption misses. If you want a night market experience on a random Friday in August, Santa Anita is closed. The market actually open tonight is almost certainly closer to home than you think, and there's a decent chance you've never heard its name in the same sentence as "626."

The Weekend Everyone Circles

626 Night Market earned its reputation honestly. Founder Jonny Hwang launched it in 2012 in the San Gabriel Valley, naming it after the region's own area code, and it grew into the kind of event that draws upward of 250 vendors and a stage lineup deep enough to include a Dreamstate DJ takeover. The 2026 Southern California calendar puts it at Santa Anita Park for two windows: June 19 through 21, and August 14 through 16. That second weekend isn't just another date. Multiple outlets covering the run describe it as the final Southern California appearance of the 2026 season, with admission at $8 online and the racetrack grounds transformed one last time before the operation heads north to Pleasanton in October.

Two long weekends a year, in one city, is the entire Southern California footprint of the market most people think of first. That scarcity is the point. The rest of the scene doesn't wait for June.

The Part of the Scene That Never Actually Closes

While 626 Night Market circles two dates on the calendar, a separate weekly circuit has built itself out across LA neighborhoods, and it runs on a clock that doesn't care what month it is.

That's five weekly touchpoints spread across four distinct parts of the city, none of them requiring a summer festival mindset to attend.

DS Night Market turns the alleys around Chinatown Central Plaza into a food row every weekend, with Thai Rodeo BBQ's stir-fried meat cups and Daeng's Desserts' mango sticky rice among the stalls locals point newcomers toward first. A few miles north, 101 Night Market has grown from a single pop-up on Corbin Avenue in Woodland Hills into a two-city weekly operation. Its Van Nuys location on Sherman Way is described by local reporting as the first weekly formal night market the west San Fernando Valley has had, and the operation's Instagram following has climbed past 74,000. The newer Hollywood Blvd location adds something the Van Nuys site doesn't have: a Sunday farmers market from 10am to 4pm at the same address, a separate event from the long-running Hollywood Farmers' Market at Ivar and Selma, which has operated since 1991.

South LA's Monchis Night Market is the newest entry on this list, established in January 2026 at 41st and Broadway, and it's already built out more than 20 vendors covering Latin American food alongside barbecue, pizza, and burger stalls, plus free onsite parking and pet allowances. And in Hollywood, the market once known as Yamashiro Night Market rebranded this year as simply Hollywood Night Market, keeping its Thursday food fest at the hilltop restaurant along with the Pagoda Bar's monthly Summer Nights concert series.

The One That Almost Didn't Make It

DS Night Market has the newest and most fragile origin story of the group. Oak Soonthornwan, who moved to Los Angeles from Bangkok with his mother 15 years ago, started the market with his family in Chinatown as what he describes as a third space, somewhere for people to meet outside of work and home. The market struggled financially last year and came close to shutting down entirely.

"A place to bring the community together."

That's how Soonthornwan describes the goal, and it's the surrounding Chinatown businesses and regulars who are credited with keeping the lights on when the finances got thin. Soonthornwan's footprint in the city goes beyond the market itself. He also helps organize Thai New Year LA, a Songkran festival now in its 17th year that closes down more than five blocks of Thai Town in Hollywood. This April, the festival set a Guinness World Record for the most Pad Thai eaten in an hour, serving 1,337 bowls and breaking the previous mark of 1,200. It's a detail that has nothing to do with Chinatown's weekend market directly, but it says something about the kind of organizer who's willing to keep a small neighborhood night market alive on community goodwill alone.

Why the Map Now Depends on Your ZIP Code

The old model was simple: one big night market, one big weekend, one long drive to Arcadia. That model still exists, but it's no longer the only way to get the experience, and for most of the city it isn't even the closest one.

If you're near Chinatown or the northeast side, DS Night Market is a short drive away and open three nights a week, every week, not just in summer. If you're in the west San Fernando Valley, Sherman Way in Van Nuys now has the kind of weekly night market that neighborhood didn't have as recently as last spring. Hollywood residents effectively have two separate weekly options within a few minutes of each other: 101 Night Market's Thursday-through-Sunday run on Hollywood Blvd, and the Thursday-only Yamashiro market with its hilltop views and Pagoda Bar sets. South LA's Monchis Night Market, barely seven months old, already has its own parking lot and a vendor list built specifically around the neighborhood it serves.

None of this replaces 626 Night Market's scale. Santa Anita Park during an August weekend is still the biggest single gathering on this list by a wide margin. But scale and access aren't the same thing. The market most people can name is the one they can attend twice a year. The markets most people can't name are the ones open every week, a few miles from where they already live.

That's usually how you can tell a place has actually settled into its neighborhoods, rather than just visiting them for a season.

We spend our weeks paying attention to exactly this kind of detail across Los Angeles and Orange County, the small shifts that tell you a neighborhood is changing shape before a headline ever catches up to it. If you're weighing a move within this stretch of Southern California and want someone who tracks the texture of a place as closely as its market data, Karean Wrightson would be glad to talk it through. Request a Complimentary Market Consultation whenever you're ready.