Restaurant Details

The aroma of lemongrass beef sticks sizzling over charcoal grills will lead you to this open-air, warm-weather market in South Philly’s FDR Park, which began in the 1980s with a Lao couple making papaya salad and chicken wings and has since expanded into a major weekend destination for food and community, with nearly 80 vendors drawing some 200,000 visitors between spring and the season’s closing.  The Southeast Asian Market is one of the most vibrant examples of Philadelphia’s immigrant experience, serving as one of the few public food spaces for members of the Lao and Cambodian communities, many of them refugees, along with vendors from Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia. It is a feast for the senses, from the pok! pok! sounds of pestles pounding papaya salads with chilies and salted crabs, to the scent of sausage-stuffed chicken wings on the grill. There are piles of crunchy-sweet deep-fried bananas and the hum of motors crushing sugarcane into refreshing cups of sweet juice. Grab a heaping plate of stir-fried lort cha noodles from the “Stir Fry Lady,” a Cambodian-flavored cheesesteak with fried pepper chips at Sahbyy, and a grilled bamboo stuffed with sweet purple sticky rice for dessert, then settle in for an al fresco feast.