Queens Night Market
A hundred-odd vendors selling food from dozens of countries on Saturday evenings in Flushing Meadows, with a deliberate price ceiling that keeps almost everything genuinely cheap.
- What it costs
- Free entry on most dates. The market has always run a low fixed price ceiling on most dishes — the point is that you can try many things.
- Best in
- Summer, Spring, Fall
- Where
- Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, near the New York Hall of Science, Queens, NY 11368
- Official site
- queensnightmarket.com
The price ceiling is the whole idea
The market was founded with an explicit cap on what most vendors can charge, specifically so that people can try six things instead of committing to one.
That single rule is why it works. You can eat across four continents in an evening for the price of one Manhattan main course, and nobody is priced out of it.
What's there
Roughly a hundred vendors, with the food deliberately reflecting Queens — which means Filipino, Colombian, Tibetan, Trinidadian, Egyptian, Thai, Salvadoran, Burmese, Ghanaian and a great deal more, often cooked by people selling their own family's food rather than a restaurant concept.
Alongside the food: merchandise stalls, artists, and live performance on a stage through the evening.
Doing it right
Go early, when it opens in the late afternoon. By 8pm on a warm Saturday the queues are long and moving through the crowd is slow.
Do a full lap before buying. Standard advice at any market, essential at this one.
Bring cash as a backup and bring people to share with.
It's outdoors and weather cancels it — check before making the trip.
Getting there
The 7 to 111th Street, then a ten-minute walk into the park. About 35 minutes from Grand Central.
Going home afterwards, the 7 is busy but frequent. It runs late.
Check the season and the date on the official site before you go — it runs Saturday evenings across the warm months, not year-round.
Getting around once you're there
Outdoors on flat paved ground, step-free throughout. It gets extremely crowded after dark, which is the practical barrier. 111th Street station is not accessible; Mets–Willets Point is, but it's a longer walk.
Nearby
In these guides
- One day in Queens: a food crawl on the 7 train
- Free and cheap things to do in Queens
- Corona and Flushing Meadows: the World's Fair park, Armstrong's house and the Night Market
- New York in summer: beaches, free concerts and how to survive the heat
- Going to the US Open: getting to Flushing Meadows and what's around it