Smorgasburg
America's largest weekly open-air food market — around a hundred vendors, outdoors, weekends from spring to fall, and the fastest way to eat your way across Brooklyn in one afternoon.
- What it costs
- Free to enter. Dishes are individually priced and portioned to share.
- Best in
- Spring, Summer, Fall
- Where
- Marsha P. Johnson State Park, Kent Avenue & N 9th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11249
- Official site
- smorgasburg.com
What it is
Started in 2011 as a Brooklyn Flea offshoot and grew into the largest weekly open-air food market in the United States — roughly a hundred vendors, all outdoors, running weekends from around April through October.
It has been a genuine launchpad: several vendors have gone on to open permanent restaurants around the city.
How to do it properly
Arrive when it opens, around 11am. By 1pm on a good-weather Saturday the queues at the popular stalls are twenty minutes deep and moving through the crowd is slow.
Do one lap before buying anything. People commit to the first thing they see and regret it four stalls later.
Go with other people and split everything. Portions are designed for sharing and the entire point is breadth.
Bring cash as a backup — most vendors take cards, but the signal on a packed waterfront is unreliable.
Practicalities
It is outdoors and it does not run in bad weather — check the site or their social feed the morning of.
Seating is limited and informal. There's shade at the edges and not much in the middle, so a hot July afternoon is genuinely punishing.
The Williamsburg site is on the waterfront with the Manhattan skyline behind it, which makes it the better of the two for a first visit.
Getting there
For the Williamsburg market: the L to Bedford Avenue, about 15 minutes from Union Square, then a ten-minute walk to the waterfront.
For the Prospect Park market: the B or Q to Prospect Park, or the F or G to 15th Street.
Locations and days shift between seasons — confirm on the official site the week you go rather than turning up where it was last year.
Getting around once you're there
Both sites are outdoors on flat, mostly paved ground. Crowds are the real barrier — it gets very dense by 1pm and moving through in a wheelchair is difficult. Arriving at opening is the answer.