Ten cities where the night market is the main event

In some cities the evening's entertainment is a show or a bar; in these ten, it's dinner — eaten standing up, ordered by pointing, cooked over fire by someone who has made the same dish ten thousand times. Night markets reward a strategy: arrive hungry but pace yourself, join the longest local queue, carry small notes and never fill up at the first stall. Nothing on this list needs a reservation, a dress code or more than a few pounds. Bring an appetite and a working sense of adventure.

Yaowarat Road in Chinatown is Bangkok's after-dark banquet: a neon canyon of woks and charcoal grills serving oyster omelettes, bird's-nest soup and Michelin-listed street stalls where the queue is the menu recommendation. Many vendors take Mondays off, so go any other night, ideally around 8pm when everything is lit and roaring. Work the sois off the main drag for the quieter gems, and save room for mango sticky rice at the end.

Shilin is the giant of Taipei's night-market galaxy — a maze of grilled squid, giant fried chicken cutlets and the pungent glory of stinky tofu, which smells like a dare and eats like a triumph. Skip the sanitised underground food court and stay at street level where the theatre is. If the crowds grind you down, Raohe market by Songshan station is smaller, better-lit and home to a legendary pepper-pork bun.

At dusk, Jemaa el-Fnaa square transforms from souk approach to open-air circus: rows of numbered food stalls fire up under lantern smoke, ringed by storytellers, musicians and snail-broth sellers. Take the aerial view first from a rooftop café terrace with a mint tea, then descend into it. Choose stalls where Moroccan families are eating, agree prices before anything lands on the table, and ignore anyone steering you 'to their cousin's'.

Osaka's motto is kuidaore — eat until you drop — and Dotonbori is where it happens, a canal of liquid neon flanked by mechanical crabs and the famous Glico runner sign. Work through takoyaki, okonomiyaki and kushikatsu skewers (dipping twice in the communal sauce is a genuine crime). When the crowds peak, duck into Hozenji Yokocho, a lantern-lit stone alley one block away where tiny bars serve the calmer nightcap.

From Friday to Sunday the Old Quarter closes to traffic and becomes one long night market flowing towards Hoan Kiem Lake — but honestly, Hanoi does this informally every evening. The essential coordinates are Ta Hien street, where fresh bia hoi lager costs pennies and everyone sits on child-sized plastic stools, and the grilled-fish and pho stalls in the surrounding lanes. Note the official midnight-ish wind-down: Hanoi parties early and hard.

By day Palermo's ancient markets sell fish; by night the Vucciria becomes an open-air party where the counters turn to bars, grills appear on the cobbles and the whole square drinks in the street. Order stigghiola or a pani ca meusa (spleen sandwich — commit) and a plastic cup of wine from Taverna Azzurra. Thursday to Saturday has the fullest crowds; Ballarò offers the scruffier, more local rehearsal earlier in the evening.

Temple Street is the last of Hong Kong's great open-air night markets and still the full theatre: fortune tellers, Cantonese opera singers, trinket stalls and dai pai dong kitchens dishing out clay-pot rice and chilli crab under strings of bare bulbs. Arrive around 9pm when the opera corner warms up, and eat at the open-air tables on Woosung Street — point at a neighbour's clay pot and order that. Haggling at the stalls is expected; start at half.

Jalan Alor is one long, lantern-lit argument for eating dinner on a plastic stool: a former red-light street now wall-to-wall with Chinese-Malay grills, satay smoke and defiantly pungent durian stands, minutes from Bukit Bintang's glossy malls. Order the char kway teow and the grilled chicken wings at Wong Ah Wah, open until roughly 4am, and drink fresh sugarcane juice against the chilli. It runs nightly, rain or monsoon; the awnings and the woks simply carry on.

Everyone comes to Xi'an for the Terracotta Army and stays for Beiyuanmen, the Muslim Quarter's food street, where the Hui community has been perfecting lamb skewers, persimmon doughnuts and hand-pulled biangbiang noodles for roughly a millennium. The street ignites after dark — all steam, cleavers and neon signage. Do as locals do with a roujiamo, the original meat sandwich, then walk it off around the floodlit Bell Tower. Bring cash or Alipay; cards are useless here.

Gwangjang is Seoul's century-old covered market, and after dark its central aisles become one glorious communal dinner table: ajummas flipping bindaetteok — mung-bean pancakes fried in enough oil to justify the soju — alongside knife-cut noodles, mayak gimbap and, for the brave, live octopus. Squeeze onto a bench, point at what looks good, and clink shot glasses with strangers. Go on a weeknight around 7pm; weekends get crushed. The pancake-and-makgeolli combination costs pennies and is non-negotiable.