San Francisco’s Biggest Night Market Plans a Triumphant Return

For a couple Friday nights in August and September of 2024, some 20,000 visitors descended on the west end of San Francisco for the Sunset Night Market — maybe the biggest, splashiest night market the city had ever seen, occupying a whopping seven blocks of Irving Street. There were lion dancers in full regalia. Lamb skewers and prehistoric-sized turkey legs served hot off the grill. Stinky tofu and durian eating contests. Martin Yan even made an appearance.

As Asian-style night markets continued their emergence as the Bay Area’s single most popular format for community events, many looked forward to seeing what new offerings the Sunset Night Market had in store for 2025. But the new season never got off the ground, as the market’s organizers struggled with funding and blowback from some of the businesses in the neighborhood. In June, organizers announced that the night market would be put “on pause” for the rest of the year.

Now, the Sunset Night Market is back with a tentative slate of four events in 2026, all of them tied to Chinese holidays — a nod to the neighborhood’s strong cultural identity as an informal Chinatown. The revamped market will kick off with a Lunar New Year–themed event on Feb. 27, followed by night markets timed to coincide with the Dragon Boat Festival (June), the Moon Festival (September), and the Winter Solstice (December).

The fact that the night market will kick off the Year of the Horse is especially auspicious, says Lily Wong, director of the Sunset Chinese Cultural District, which helps organize the event.

“In Chinese, we actually have a saying about [how] when the horse arrives, success arrives too,” Wong says. The hope is for the event to usher in a longer-term night market that’s more sustainable than last year’s edition.

Angie Petitt, founder of Sunset Mercantile, another of the night market’s organizers, says the event’s ultimate goal is to show off the diversity of the Sunset and to “help bring a lot more attention to these wonderful brick-and-mortars that line Irving Street.”

Some media reports speculated that last year’s run of night markets may have been scuttled at least in part for political reasons — which is to say, because the Sunset Night Market was too closely associated with embattled (and eventually recalled) District 4 Supervisor Joel Engardio, who helped spearhead the event in 2023. Wong and Petitt, however, are adamant that politics had nothing to do with it. Instead, they say, the problem mostly had to do with funding. In particular, there was an eight-month delay before organizers received the $120,000 in city grant money promised by San Francisco’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development (OEWD) for the 2024 markets.

“We just weren’t confident that we could run the market when we were already in debt, so that took a little bit of time to figure out,” Wong says.

For now, the 2026 iteration of the night market is being funded by grants from both the OEWD and the nonprofit Avenue Greenlight — though Wong stresses that they’re still looking for additional sponsors.

Meanwhile, even though the huge scale of the night market’s 2024 season made it one of the splashiest events in the city, the market’s seven-block footprint also posed significant challenges. Those events drew 20,000 visitors to the Sunset each night, which was a boon to some of the local businesses — but the street closures and huge crowds proved to be a big inconvenience for others.

This year’s events will be “right-sized” to five blocks instead of seven — a happy medium that Wong hopes is more viable for the future. And while organizers have applied to host the first two night markets (on Feb. 27 and June 12) on Irving Street, Wong says they’re open to moving future editions to other parts of the greater Sunset area — perhaps to Parkside or Noriega Street — if business owners in those neighborhoods are interested.