Night Markets in Ho Chi Minh City: Hours, Food and How to Get There

Which market should you pick for food?

Pick Vinh Khanh food street for a seafood dinner and Ho Thi Ky for snacks; treat Ben Thanh night market as a walk rather than a meal. The places with “night market” in their name mostly sell clothes, while the places where Saigon eats after dark are food streets.

Hours in the table are the usual pattern rather than a fixed timetable, because the stalls are run by independent traders. The homepage lays the four food areas side by side in where the city eats at night.

Is Ben Thanh night market worth visiting?

Ben Thanh night market is worth a short visit for the setting, not for dinner. The stalls are set up outside the market hall, on Phan Boi Chau and Phan Chu Trinh streets either side of it, and usually run from about 6 pm until 10–11 pm. Most sell clothes, bags and souvenirs; only a few sell food. The hall itself opened in 1914 and keeps day hours of roughly 6 am to 6 pm, so its doors are shut by the time the night stalls light up.

The draw is the setting: the clock tower over the main gate lit up, Ben Thanh station on metro Line 1 in front of the market, and Nguyen Hue walking street a short walk away, closed to traffic from 6 pm. Twenty minutes is enough for most people.

The cooking happens in the old centre around it. Banh xeo, the large southern crepe made with turmeric and coconut milk and filled with shrimp, pork and bean sprouts, is wrapped in mustard greens and herbs at the table. Bo la lot is minced beef grilled in wild betel leaves, and bot chien is a fried rice-flour cake with egg that came from Saigon’s Chinese kitchens. Our Ben Thanh night market food tour eats those first, then reaches the market as it lights up for chuoi nep nuong, banana wrapped in sticky rice and grilled in a banana leaf with warm coconut cream and peanuts, and sugarcane juice pressed while you wait.

What is the Cholon night street, and when should you go?

The Cholon night street is a night market of food carts and food trucks on the pavements of four streets in front of Binh Tay Market — Nguyen Huu Than, Thap Muoi, Le Tan Ke and Tran Binh — trading from 6 pm to midnight every day. It opened on a trial in December 2025 and was officially launched in April 2026, when the city counted around 800 visitors a day. The carts sell Chinese-Vietnamese drinks and sweets: nuoc sam herbal drink, quy linh cao herbal jelly, ca phe vot coffee filtered through a cloth sock, and banh pia pastries.

Go in the late afternoon and stay into the evening. Binh Tay Market, built around 1930 in the former District 6 near the former District 5, starts pulling its shutters down from about 4 pm so its clock tower is best seen before dark. On weeknights the night street can be thin: during the trial months, a January 2026 report found few food carts outside weekends and mostly drinks for sale.

The real cooking is in the streets around it, such as Ha Ton Quyen, a street of dumpling shops more than 700 metres long. Our Cholon food tour starts at 3:30 pm for that reason: Thien Hau Temple before it closes, the market’s clock tower, sui cao dumplings and herbal duck noodles, then the night street once it opens.

Where does Saigon actually eat at night?

Saigon eats at night on food streets, and Vinh Khanh is the one to know. It runs for just under a kilometre through Khanh Hoi ward in the former District 4, lined with hundreds of snail and seafood restaurants. The city made it an official food street in 2018, and Time Out placed it 10th of 31 in its 2025 list of the world’s coolest streets. It fills up after about 7 pm, is busiest at weekends and stays busy until around midnight.

How to eat on Vinh Khanh

Vinh Khanh is not pedestrianised: motorbikes park along both sides and still pass, and you eat on low plastic stools beside them. Snails come by the plate — sea snails in garlic butter, scallops grilled with spring onion oil, crab claws roasted with salt and chilli. In February 2026 a meal at a snail restaurant came to about VND 200,000 a person, and grilled crab claws cost VND 200,000–500,000 depending on size. Some seafood is sold by weight, so ask the weight and the price before it goes on the grill, and keep an eye on bags and phones.

Ho Thi Ky: the flower market with a food alley

Ho Thi Ky, in Vuon Lai ward in the former District 10, is a flower market that trades through the night, with food alleys behind it that usually run from about 3 pm to 11 pm. The alleys grew around families who came back from Cambodia in the 1970s, which is why Cambodian-style noodles and sweet soups sit beside crab soup and banh trang nuong, rice paper grilled over charcoal with quail egg, dried shrimp and spring onion. Our Vinh Khanh food tour starts here at 5:30 pm and moves on to the snail street by car.

Are there local night markets away from the centre?

Yes, and they are clothes markets first. Hanh Thong Tay market on Quang Trung street, in Thong Tay Hoi ward in the former Go Vap district north of the centre, runs a night shift from about 6 pm to 11 pm. More than 200 traders sell budget clothes, shoes and accessories, with snack carts for fish balls, flan and sugarcane juice. The entrance gets crowded and motorbike parking spills onto the street.

Ba Chieu market, at the junction of Phan Dang Luu, Le Quang Dinh and Bach Dang streets in the former Binh Thanh district, is a day market that keeps going into the evening. It trades from about 5 am until late, its clothing stalls usually close around 7 to 8 pm, and evening is when the food sellers around it are busiest: sticky rice wrapped in banana leaf, snails, grilled pork with noodles and sweet soups.

Neither market is on our tours. Both are worth the trip for local prices on clothes; for food alone, the four areas above are easier to reach and better stocked.

How do you get to the night markets?

A ride-hailing app or a metered taxi is the simplest way between the markets; only Ben Thanh, and at a stretch Vinh Khanh, are realistic on foot from the old centre. The table gives the usual journey from the Ben Thanh area.

Rush hour, roughly 4:30 to 6:30 pm, can double journey times, and it falls exactly when most night markets open. From May to November, short heavy showers are common in the afternoon and evening, which is the other reason a car between stops makes the night easier.

What is worth your evening, and what can you skip?

Worth it: Vinh Khanh for a seafood dinner, Ho Thi Ky for a snack crawl before it, Cholon from late afternoon into the night street, ideally at a weekend, and Ben Thanh for twenty minutes of lights on the way to Nguyen Hue.

Skip or limit: Ben Thanh night market as a dinner plan, a weeknight trip across town for the Cholon night street alone, and Hanh Thong Tay or Ba Chieu unless you want to shop.

What changes with a guide is what lands on the table. Your guide is a licensed local from Saigon who knows which stall on a street of hundreds is worth sitting at, orders in Vietnamese, checks the seafood in front of you and explains how each dish is eaten and why the city loves it. Night Market Ho Chi Minh runs four private tours with four menus and no dish twice. Every menu is a sample and is rebuilt before the tour: a shellfish allergy turns the Vinh Khanh night into grilled fish and charcoal-grilled meat, and a vegetarian gets banh xeo filled with tofu and mushrooms. If evenings are too hot or too late for your group, our Saigon breakfast food tour covers pho, com tam and banh mi before 10:30 am.

Questions about Saigon’s night markets

Market hours, fares and prices were checked in November 2026 and are set by the markets, stalls and drivers, not by us.