The very non-political concept of a neighborhood night market got very political during the Recall Joel Engardio campaign, but the Sunset Night Market is back for 2026, and has its first event on Friday, February 27.

Sometime since about 2023, San Francisco has caught night market mania for these neighborhood-specific outdoor street events with food trucks, vendors, live music, and often even open containers of alcohol. But in 2025, the very popular Sunset Night Market was abruptly placed on hiatus, with many blaming the politics of the Joel Engardio recall for the event’s temporary demise. The event had also reportedly grown large and unwieldy, and expensive to produce.

While some Sunset business owners put together a smaller, privately funded one-off version called Sunset After Dark, there were serious questions whether the Sunset Night Market would return in 2026.


The Sunset Night Market will indeed return in 2026 according to the event’s co-organizers at Sunset Mercantile. "Exciting News, San Francisco: Sunset Night Market is BACK for Lunar New Year 2026!” they said in a Wednesday social media announcement. The first 2026 event is scheduled for Friday, February 27, on Irving Street between 20th and 25th avenues.

(For your reference, that February 27 date is still a full week before the official SF Chinese New Year Parade weekend, as this year that big parade falls on Saturday, March 7.)


The first Sunset Night Market in 2023 managed to bring chef Martin Yan into the mix, and the event was a favorite spot for politicians looking to find favor among Asian-American voters. (Though obviously, the above tweet is something of a political graveyard of said politicians.) And some tried to blame Engardio recall animus for the event’s 2025 demise, but the reality is that the Sunset Night Market probably just got too large to manage, with 20,000 attendees at its peak.

The "doubling the size” strategy in 2024 may have been a miscue, and certainly fostered a resentment between the food trucks and street vendors who relied on the event financially, versus the Sunset brick-and-mortar shops who felt the event was stealing their business. It is also very notable that organizers say that SF City Hall was quite slow to reimburse them for expenses, which handed some organizers substantial financial hardship.

We see that this new rebooted Sunset Night Market is only five blocks long, so it’s clearly scaled down from its seven-block peak in 2024.

And this is a welcome return. Back last April, USA Today published a national list of the country's best night markets, and named the Sunset Night Market at Number 5 — with SF's Chinatown Night Market coming in at Number 1.

There will apparently be more Sunset Night Markets in 2026. The SF Standard notes there is a permit for a June 12 event, and that “Two [other dates] are under consideration for later in the year, potentially around the Mid-Autumn Festival and the Winter Solstice.”

Related: Sunset Night Market on Pause, Possibly Falling Victim to Recall Fight Involving Supervisor Joel Engardio [SFist]

Image: @JoelEngardio via Twitter