A neighbor mentioned it at the mailbox last month: a night market, tacos and skewers and something called a Beso de Angel cake, somewhere off Corbin Avenue in Woodland Hills. She'd bookmarked it from a friend's Instagram story back in the spring. When she finally carved out a Thursday to go, the lot was empty. No grills, no string lights, no vendors. Just a stretch of curb that used to host something and doesn't anymore.
That's not a story about a market closing. It's a story about a market that has changed addresses twice since launching last year and is now sitting a few minutes from Lake Balboa Park instead of Woodland Hills. If you've been meaning to check it out based on something you saw months ago, there's a decent chance your information is already out of date.
A market that keeps outrunning its own footprint
According to the Militant Angeleno's Southern California night market guide, 101 Night Market launched in May 2025 as a two-night pop-up on Corbin Avenue near the Birmingham Veterans campus in Woodland Hills, running Thursdays and Fridays. It didn't stay small for long. By October 2025 it had relocated to Warner Center for more room, and it's since moved to a fixed spot at the corner of Sherman Way and Balboa Boulevard, right where Van Nuys becomes Lake Balboa.
Here's the short version of where it's been:
| Location | Approximate Timeframe | What Changed |
|---|---|---|
| Corbin Ave, Woodland Hills | Launched May 2025 | Two-night pop-up, Thursdays and Fridays only |
| Warner Center, Woodland Hills | Moved October 2025 | Bigger lot to handle growing crowds |
| Sherman Way & Balboa Blvd, Lake Balboa | Current | Fixed address, four nights a week, plus a second site added in Hollywood |
Three addresses since last spring show how often the market has changed locations. Yelp categorizes the current Sherman Way location under Lake Balboa, and the Militant Angeleno's guide calls it the first weekly formal night market in the west San Fernando Valley, a claim that holds up given how few recurring markets of this size exist west of the 405 in the Valley.
What's actually there once you find it
The draw isn't a single stall. It's the mix. Expect Filipino, Mexican, Thai, and Vietnamese street food alongside dessert and drink vendors, with the lineup rotating from week to week rather than staying fixed. The Militant Angeleno counts more than 20 food, craft, and merchandise vendors setting up on a typical night, which is a meaningful footprint for a lot that didn't host anything like this two years ago.
Parking is free onsite, with the entrance at Genesta Avenue, plus street parking along Sherman Way. If you'd rather leave the car, Metro bus line 162 runs along Sherman Way and lines 235 and 236 run along Balboa Boulevard, both dropping you within a short walk.
The detail most people driving out there will miss
Here's the part worth knowing before you go. The market's own Instagram bio lists hours of 5 p.m. to 11 p.m., Thursday through Sunday, every week. But a food journalism outlet that tracked the move reported that the Yelp listing for the same address shows a slightly different picture: a narrower Thursday window and an earlier Sunday closing, both ending around 10 p.m. instead of 11.
That's a small gap, an hour here and there, but it's the kind of gap that matters if you're timing a visit around a specific closing time rather than just showing up early. The practical move is to check the market's Instagram the same day you're planning to go rather than trusting whatever hours a directory last updated. A market that relocates this often tends to outpace the listings tracking it.
An old neighborhood habit sitting a few blocks away
None of this displaces what was already here. A few minutes down Vanowen Street, Soofi Mediterranean has been serving Persian breakfast, kabobs, and stews since new ownership took it over in October 2022. It's open daily for dine-in and takeout, with weekend breakfast starting at 10 a.m., and it hasn't moved an inch while the night market on the other side of the neighborhood was still figuring out where to park its tents.
That contrast says something honest about how this pocket of the Valley eats right now. You've got a decades-old, single-address Persian kitchen on one street and a four-night-a-week pop-up that's already on its third home on another, and both are drawing steady crowds. Lake Balboa isn't choosing between its old anchors and its new arrivals. It's holding both at once, within walking distance of each other.
Why the churn itself is the story
It would be easy to write this as a straightforward "new thing to try" post, and on one level, it is that. But the more interesting fact isn't that a night market exists near Lake Balboa. It's that this particular one has had three different locations since last spring, added a second location in Hollywood along the way, and by one report this past August had built an Instagram following north of 74,000, all while most secondhand directory listings still haven't caught up with where it actually is or what hours it actually keeps.
That kind of rapid, still-settling growth is unusual for this part of the Valley. Most of what changes around here changes slowly. A restaurant gets new ownership. A shop closes and something else moves in six months later. A market that relocates twice in about a year and keeps expanding rather than fading out is a different animal, and it's worth knowing that the fastest-growing thing near Lake Balboa right now isn't a restaurant or a store. It's a Thursday-through-Sunday habit that didn't exist in this neighborhood at all until fairly recently.
If you already live near Lake Balboa, this is one more thread in the pattern locals have been tracking, alongside the three very different ways people actually get onto the lake itself. Both stories point to the same thing: the neighborhood rewards people who check current information rather than relying on what they heard last season.
So if you're planning a Thursday night out based on something you saw months back, do the five-second check first. Pull up the market's own Instagram, confirm it's still parked at Sherman Way and Balboa, and confirm the closing hour before you commit to a plan built around it. The lot the market used to occupy in Woodland Hills is empty now. The one it occupies today won't necessarily be the last.
Curious what else has shifted in the neighborhood lately, from restaurant openings to the quieter stuff that never makes a headline? Robert Ramos tracks this corridor closely and is always happy to talk through what's actually changing on the ground here. Book a free neighborhood strategy call anytime you want a local read that goes beyond the last thing you saw on Instagram.
