I read this: https://sf.eater.com/2020/8/7/21358954/the-night-market-south-san-francisco-street-food-opening and decided to check it out.
First, the layout is terrible for COVID. On of my friends almost simply left. The fact that you have to wait in an indoor space to order is just unnecessary. The fact that they don’t broadcast your number to the outdoor so people stand around indoors where they make the food is flat-out unnecessary. These two things are very easy to fix and you might freak out going there. Most of the people there are asian and look 20 to 30 and fairly unconcerned, although 100% mask compliance. I ended up waiting in the food line having taken orders from my party.
The amount of outdoor seating is moderate. Most is in the sun in the parking lot, there’s one little bit at the coffee shop in the building that’s covered. Don’t go if you need shade.
The food was pretty good, and the atmosphere was festive. The only alcohol was average bottled beer, I would have liked Harbin or something in the large bottles. The menu really has high points, but (somewhat unfortunately) they are the fried foods. People rave about the doughnut, we really liked the salty egg squash ( fried ) and the chicken wings ( fried ) and the fried tofu got all eaten before I had a chance, so it must have been good. The satay brisket is quite good, and not fried, it’s the slow cooked turnips that make a stellar dish. The soup dumplings had a huge amount of flavor and only a moderate amount of soup, which was pretty good. The dumplings in general were more on the thick-skin side, not super thin, which was OK because they were being dumped into a plastic container with no separation - thin dumplings would have torn.
I think I’ll agree with the yelp reviews that the hype is over the execution, because, I mean, chicken wings you can get anywhere, but we did get ( by mistake ) the fried intestines, and they were SUPER INTENSE. That was very much a “night market” moment, when you got something not quite what you thought and experienced something new.
We arrived at 8pm Saturday night before a 9pm stop, which ended up being perfect. The sun goes down right at 8pm, so it was mostly dusk, and thus felt more like a night market. The line was winding down, the kitchen was catching up, so I think we had our food by 8:40, did a small second order at 8:58 
, and sat out in the evening air for another 30 minutes. I am not sure it would be OK during the day because it’s a rather parched parking lot, nor might it be OK for takeout because there are better dumpling places.
I don’t know if I’ll be back, but as a “get out of the house destination” for the week, it was a huge hit.
Enjoyable!
