The Five Best Things I Ate at The Lot in Richmond

Every Tuesday and Thursday, a small, empty lot in Richmond transforms into one of the Bay Area’s most vibrant street food markets. About 15 or 20 food tents line up at any given time, the smell of fish sauce, Thai basil, smoked meat and fried plantains wafting in the air.

Welcome to The Lot. 

Open since October 2024, when it launched with the more literal (if somewhat unsexy) name, “Mobile Vendor Plaza Market,” the outdoor food court grew out of a city initiative meant to deter unlicensed street vending in Richmond. It offers those food vendors a pathway to legitimacy, along with a central location, just a short walk from the BART station, where they can peddle their wares. 

Over the past few months, I’ve been slowly eating my way through the market, though it still feels like I’ve barely cracked the surface. For now, none of the stands are big, established brands with a lot of social media hype. They’re just cooking up tasty food, without the fuss.

Here are the five most delicious dishes I’ve tried so far, in no particular order.

This might be the best-known stand in The Lot’s stable of food vendors, as it’s run by the folks behind Souk Savanh, the dearly departed, super-budget-friendly Lao-Thai restaurant in Oakland (currently on hiatus as it gears up to move to a new location).

At The Lot, Pai’s Eatery serves a stripped-down version of the restaurant menu, featuring hearty rice bowls and noodle bowls for as little as $10. Their Lao sausage patties are one of my all-time favorites, but recently, I’ve become enamored with the basil pork belly over rice: big cubes of crispy, skin-on pork belly tossed with a saucy, colorful mix of bell peppers, onions and Thai basil.

In terms of sheer value and portion size, GRL’s Jamaican food stall is the king of The Lot (and maybe the whole East Bay). I paid $15 for a “small” jerk chicken plate, and the takeout container was absolutely jam-packed with food: two big, saucy chicken legs, chopped up into smaller chunks; several slices of fried plantains; the doughy Jamaican fried bread known as festival; and a pile of steamed cabbage — all over a big scoop of rice and peas to soak up the juices. (It’s hard for me to even conceive how much food must come with the $22 large plate.)

More importantly, this is some of the tastiest jerk chicken I’ve had in a minute — smoky and incredibly tender with a zip of heat, slathered in a jerk-style barbecue sauce that’s more savory and spicy than sweet. The most delicious bites were the little bits of charred, blackened skin.

Fried chicken and fries ‘estilo chapín’ from Pollo Con Papas Fritas

The Lot is home to two near-identical stands selling Guatemalan-style fried chicken. During my most recent market visit, the stand I tried, Pollo Con Papas Fritas (not to be confused with the nearby Pollo Con Papas) was the slightly busier operation between the two, and its chicken proved thoroughly up to snuff.

This isn’t the aggressively seasoned Pollo Campero–style fast food fried chicken that’s popular in Guatemala and El Salvador. Instead, it’s more of a Guatemalan street food style: For $12, you get two pieces of dark meat buried under a giant mound of thick, hand-cut fries topped with colorful squeeze-bottle squiggles of ketchup, mayo and green salsa. The fries are fine, more fluffy than crisp by design, but the real beauty of the dish is that the chicken itself is so thoroughly buried underneath that it’s shielded from all that sauce: The skin stays nice and crunchy, and the flesh is hot and decently juicy.

One of the only Cameroonian food businesses I’ve come across in the Bay Area, Kilama Passion Foods’ tent serves a catfish stew that is shockingly, but quite tastily, tomato-forward — “almost chicken parm–like” was my initial reaction.

I like all the other components of the plate even better: the plump grains of seasoned yellow rice and, especially, the fried plantains, which are extra crispy around the edges.

I ignored this Mexican churro stand during my first couple of trips to The Lot because, well, I figured I can get churros anywhere in Richmond. Now I can’t imagine not snagging a churro or two from Churros My Fren before I leave. These are some of the best I’ve had in recent memory — they’re long and skinny, with deep ridges that help maximize their crinkly cinnamon sugar–enhanced crunch, while the inside stays tender and custardy.

Like many of The Lot’s offerings, the churros are a bargain at $2 apiece. One of these days, I’ll bring a couple of friends along and splurge on the giant, spiral-shaped churro rosca.

The Lot is open from roughly 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Each stand keeps its own hours, though, and you’ll find a slightly different mix of vendors at lunchtime than you will in the evening. Many of the food vendors also sell at Richmond’s Marina Bay farmers market on Sundays.