Main entrance to the Asia Collective Night Market

The inaugural Asia Collective Night Market was held on Saturday, August 20, 2022 at the Howard County Fairgrounds in West Friendship, Maryland. The concept was to hold a food festival to mimic the famous night markets from Asian countries. Rows of food stalls would be available for attendees to sample foods from various Asian ethnicities in the same vein as last year’s DC REDEYE Night Market event. Unfortunately, the Asia Collective Night Market ended up being either just as bad or even more disastrous than its DC counterpart.

Despite being billed as a Night Market the start time for the event was actually at 2pm and was scheduled to run until 11pm. I left my house with the intent on arriving there at around 2:30pm. As I got nearer to the destination my GPS redirected me to the backroads to avoid a slowdown on the main highway. However about two miles away from the destination the one-lane road became clogged with cars and it took almost an hour to go the last two miles to reach the fairgrounds. As I went to park my car no one asked to see my parking ticket (which costs $10) and after the event was over it became apparent that no tickets were checked and that everyone who showed up basically got to park for free. This was explained by the organizers of the event as a means to speed up the entry of the cars in order to reduce traffic. Although that didn’t seem to help out very much considering that there was a backup of cars for miles on I-70 and other major roads with some attendees complaining that it took them 4-5 hours to get through that traffic.

Once arrived at the event, the Night Market turned out to be a fenced area in the parking lot of the fairgrounds and not actually taking place in the Howard County Fairground facilities itself. So instead of taking advantage of the buildings for cover from the hot sun everything was outdoors and mostly uncovered. The food stands were also tightly packed together so the long lines due to the enormous crowd were snaked around in a chaotic and unorganized manner. It was almost impossible to tell where some of the lines ended and some of the vendors were victims of these unmanaged lines. In particular, I know that the Tae-Gu Kimchi and Queen’s English food stands that were located in the middle of the center row were block by lines snaking around from other booths which must have impacted their business as many folks would have assumed that those lines in front of their stands belonged to them when in reality there was no lines for them at all.

Speaking of crowds, ticket sales for the event were cut off the night before with the organizers saying that the event was sold out and those without tickets would be turned away at the gates. However many attendees reported that as the day went on they were able to walk right into the event without needing to show their ticket (which was a $10 entrance fee) which no doubt led to an increase in numbers of those entering the Night Market without a paid ticket and helped to make the crowd even bigger than what would have been considered safe for the size of the venue. The lines of people everywhere you went made it very hard to get from one end of the venue to the other end even though the venue itself was not really that large. There also were not very many areas set up for people to eat so most people just sat on the ground to eat their food while baking under the hot sun.

Most of the food lines went anywhere from 30 minutes to even 3 hours depending on the stand. There were definitely some vendors that knew how to set up a workflow in a festival environment and then there were those that definitely did not. I’d like to give a shout out to Kyoto Matcha for being smart and tech savvy to allow attendees to place orders online and receive a pickup time so that they would not have to wait in line for their order. Things could definitely improve if more vendors can figure out how to improve their workflow to reduce the wait times. Although with the Night Market starting early at 2pm and with traffic jams out the wazoo lasting for most of the day, a lot of vendors were starting to run out of food by 7 or 8pm with no way to get more supplies in.

In terms of entertainment, there was just a main stage that had various singers come on to perform and they had a section of the ground in front of the Main Stage blocked off as a demo area where occasionally they had various ethnic performances but that location was certainly far from ordeal. They really could have benefited from having additional stages so that the other performers would have a proper venue to perform on.

Lastly, the venue did not have very many trash cans set up. While there was a crew that did their rounds to empty the trash cans throughout the day, they did not make very frequent trips so the trash cans were almost always in a constant state of being full with a mountain of trash built up around it. It would also appear that no cleanup was conducted at the end of the night as someone posted photos to Facebook the following day of the state that the fairgrounds was in. (I do not own any rights to the following photos that I got from the Facebook post).

In the end, the concept of the Night Market was a great one and clearly one that tens of thousands of people have a interest in. However, the event was clearly disorganized and grossly mismanaged and needed to occupy at least double or even triple the amount of space that it did. As I was walking back towards my car to head home I walked past a group of people heading in the opposite direction to go to the Night Market and I overhead a girl say “Wow, this is a sad looking fair”. And so it was.