Organizers will never forget that Thursday evening in May 2023. Traffic snarled along Government Street, backing up to the interstate, as patrons poured into the first Night Market BTR at the Electric Depot in Mid City. Eager to celebrate Asian culture, they lined up for tastes of salmon bombs, Korean corn dogs and okonomiyaki, a Japanese pancake street food.
That is—if vendors didn’t run out. An unexpected 2,500 attendees crowded the event, far surpassing expectations.
Months before, organizer Laura Siu-Nguyen had visited a night market in California with her husband, Kenny Nguyen. The outdoor festivals, which have deep roots in East Asian culture, have spread across the globe over the last 20 years. The couple, vocal Baton Rouge proponents, believed the city needed its own. Siu-Nguyen recruited about 20 food and art vendors. Working closely with the restaurants Boru Ramen and Sweet Society, she held the gathering that May in conjunction with Asian/Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
Taylor Fairbanks / Courtesy Night Market BTR
“I expected maybe 200 people to show up,” she recalls.
By 2024, the festival’s second edition had doubled its number of vendors and relocated to downtown Baton Rouge. This time, 10,000 attendees shuffled shoulder-to-shoulder in Rhorer Plaza. And the 2025 event, slated for May 10 with about 60 vendors along Spanish Town Road, promises to be even bigger and more inventive.
“My challenge to all the vendors is: People are coming into the festival for the vibes, but they also want to try new foods they’ve never tried before,” Siu-Nguyen says. “You have a community in Baton Rouge that is more open-minded than we’ve ever been before.”
Local restaurants and cottage businesses have answered the call. After the pistachio-filled Dubai chocolate bar went viral last summer, Baton Rouge boutique chocolatier Chocolate Bijoux created its own version. French-inspired dessert shop Bonjour similarly riffed on the trend, bringing Dubai chocolate crepes and a spinoff treat, the strawberry kunafa cup, to its Baton Rouge and Denham Springs storefronts.
Operators say patrons are more educated and enthusiastic about the latest global flavors.
“That’s the biggest thing,” says Jordan Ramirez, owner of the pan-Asian street food eatery Chow Yum. “People’s knowledge of food and ingredients has just grown so much over, I’d say, the last five years. And they have more access, with places popping up all over town.”
“People’s knowledge of food and ingredients has just grown so much. … And they have more access, with places popping up all over town.”
[—Jordan Ramirez, Owner of Chow Yum]
Night Market BTR ignited something that has been brewing in the Capital Region—and across the country. Local diners are more interested than ever in global cuisine.
It’s a trend that has evolved quickly over the last decade, with the rise of new small businesses, restaurants and boundary-bending operators inspired by world flavors.
It builds on an already robust base of local international concepts, but it suggests a new level of diner engagement. The desire for more global offerings was a commonly cited request in an open-ended survey of 675 Capital Region diners that 225 conducted last summer.
“People are coming into the festival for the vibes, but they also want to try new foods they’ve never tried before.”
[—Night Market BTR founder Laura Siu-Nguyen]
“People are more interested,” Boru Ramen and Sweet Society co-owner Patrick Wong echoes. “They’re more receptive to new things.”
The vibe has inspired Wong to evolve his 5-year-old concepts, Boru Ramen and Sweet Society. The pair of restaurants recently relocated to a shared space on Essen Lane, where Wong also added a trendy 20-machine claw arcade. Among numerous tweaks at Sweet Society, he installed a build-your-own boba bar.
The local growth squares with national trends.
Global cuisine has consistently been one of the fastest expanding subsets of the hospitality industry, according to national market research firm af&co. Citing Gen Z as an accelerant, it declared the “appreciation for global flavors, unbound by tradition” to be one of seven macro trends defining the dining world in 2025. Its report also singled out Asian convenience foods and snacks, as well as late-night Asian dessert cafes, among the biggest fads to watch in 2025. And it predicted dondurma—Turkish ice cream—as an emerging player.
Historically, it’s taken several years for culinary trends seen on the East and West coasts to make their way to smaller metros like Baton Rouge. But social media has vaporized the timeline. TikTok catapulted foods like cloud bread and upgraded instant ramen, inspiring diners everywhere to seek them out at home.
Ramirez chuckles that one of his menu staples has hit numerous local menus, including the buzzy Colonel’s Club nearby.
“You see bao buns everywhere now,” he says.
Ramirez points not just to restaurants answering consumer tastes, but to the nearly 30 international stores and supermarkets in Baton Rouge, too. To supply Chow Yum, he visits longtime Asian grocery Vinh Phat Market, along with Asian Supermarket, which opened in 2017. And he routinely sources spices from 10-year-old Kased’s International Market, a Middle Eastern grocery store.
In recent years, the Capital Region has seen a profusion of Latin American spots bypassing the Tex-Mex label. Think: newer “modern Mexican” concepts like Modesto Tacos Tequila Whiskey, pictured here.
Ramirez says one of the biggest changes he’s seen in the Capital Region is a profusion of Latin American spots bypassing the Tex-Mex label. Newer “modern Mexican” concepts like Modesto Tacos Tequila Whiskey, Blue Corn Tequila & Tacos, Luna Cocina and the brand-new Veracruz Restaurant expose diners to regional Mexican fare. And, 2-year-old Brasas Peru has revealed untapped enthusiasm for Peruvian food.
Meanwhile, Siu-Nguyen is responding to the appetite for other globally inspired events. Last year, she helped facilitate the Asian Mid-Autumn Festival at BREC’s Independence Park Theatre and Cultural Center, and she has reintroduced her Table Story series, a multicourse dinner pop-up held at local restaurants that celebrate heritage eats.
A dynamic by-product of Night Market BTR has been its ability to springboard some pioneering vendors into business.
One of those is the year-old pop-up Oni, a concept serving onigiri, or Japanese rice balls.
“When there’s a food pop-up, there’s this curiosity. People are like, ‘Ooh, what do they have?’”
[—Shawn Cao, co-owner of Oni, a Night Market BTR vendor]
Founders Shawn Cao and Riley Dunaway say last year’s Night Market BTR helped them test their idea.
Selling out of over 700 rice balls supplied the confidence to launch a pop-up after the festival. Business has exploded since, with their schedule now booked six weeks in advance. They often collaborate with another Night Market BTR vendor, EM’s Bakery, which specializes in Japanese cheesecakes and other sweets.
“Response has been amazing,” Cao says. “When there’s a food pop-up, there’s this curiosity. People are like, ‘Ooh, what do they have?’”
This article was originally published in the March 2025 issue of 225 Magazine.
