‘Kicked out of Chinatown’: The story of Ottawa’s two Asian night markets

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How nervous was Simon Huang when he staged Ottawa Asian Fest Night Market at Tanger Outlets Ottawa almost a year ago?

“Very,” he says. Nor was he alone.

After changing venues repeatedly since it launched in 2014, Huang’s event moved from Ottawa’s downtown to a western suburban mall’s parking lot. Street-food vendors coming from Toronto to Kanata thought they would be “in the middle of nowhere,” far from public transportation and potential customers, Huang says.

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“Everybody was worried that nobody was going to show up,” he says.

Surprise. The event drew, as it had previously elsewhere, more than 20,000 people. Half of its 40 or so vendors ran out of food on Saturday, the second of the event’s three days, and had nothing left to sell on Sunday. Tanger mall visitors were seeking parking in neighbouring lots and cars backed up until the Queensway exit, Huang says.

“We went beyond our expectations. We didn’t expect that many people to show up.”

Adding to his jitters a year ago was the fact that another Asian night market was happening simultaneously, in Chinatown, Ottawa’s historic nexus for Asian culture, where Huang’s event had previously taken place before the pandemic.

The Ottawa Chinatown Night Market and Huang’s Ottawa Asian Fest Night Market went head to head in 2022 and 2023, and they’ll do so again this weekend.

With near-perfect weather in the forecast, the two events — one downtown, the other suburban — could draw a combined 50,000 people or more to sample Asian street food from dozens of vendors, both out-of-town and local, and take in live entertainment at events, which take place all day Saturday and Sunday, despite being called “night markets.”

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However, the two events will take place with the whiff of bad blood in the air.

The key players behind each night market have different versions of what transpired that led to the fracture, and negotiations between both sides to bring everyone together in Chinatown failed.

Then, this week, Huang’s event announced that it would run eight free shuttle buses from a Dalhousie Street location to bring downtowners to the Tanger mall night market.

“That doesn’t sit well with me,” says Ottawa Coun. Ariel Troster, whose Somerset Ward includes Chinatown.

“Booking buses to directly compete with Chinatown, it seems nakedly ambitious and just really unfair to the local businesses downtown that are working so hard to put on an event,” Troster says in an interview. “We have plenty of people who live in Kanata and plenty of people who live downtown and there’s plenty of room for both events. They shouldn’t be competing directly with each other.”

Huang disagreed. “That’s so silly,” he responded in an interview. “I don’t know how you feel threatened by one school bus… They’re making a big deal out of something that’s not there.”

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Before the pandemic, there was only one Asian night market — the one organized by Huang — in Ottawa.

This year, his event marks its 10th anniversary. The 2014 event was a day-long, Lunar New Year gathering that drew about 2,000 people to the EY Centre.

“Surprisingly, it went pretty well,” says Huang, who now owns two Dao Bake & Sip Cafés and three Tealive teashops in Ottawa, but who was a federal public servant 10 years ago. One of his Tealive stores is in Chinatown.

Asian Fest’s much larger sequels in 2015 and 2016 were full weekends in Lansdowne Park. Huang’s event then relocated to Chinatown, under the auspices of the Chinatown BIA. The night market flourished there in 2017, 2018 and 2019. The event was cancelled in 2020 and 2021 due to COVID-19.

Then, in 2022, the night-market beef began.

“Nobody really knows the backstory about why there are two night markets,” says Huang. “People think we’re the bad one, that we’re the one that left Chinatown.

“We’re the ones that got kicked out of Chinatown.”

Yukang Li, the Chinatown BIA’s executive director, says that in the fall of 2021, he emailed Huang repeatedly about bringing his night market back to Chinatown in 2022. “I didn’t get a response, and then I had to seek another organizer who was capable of doing this job,” Li says.

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Huang, meanwhile, says that in the spring of 2022, he started planning to hold his night market in Chinatown, only to find out that “Chinatown was using another company from Toronto to organize their own night market,” he says. “We were a little baffled.”

Huang wound up staging his Ottawa Asian Fest Night Market on Sparks Street in 2022, on the same weekend as the first Ottawa Chinatown Night Market on Somerset Street West.

Li thought that having the two events competing in such close proximity was regrettable.

“That was the situation neither party would want to see,” he says. “Sparks Street is so close to Chinatown. Two similar events on the same weekend does not help with either.” Li adds that he had a hard time finding enough vendors in 2022.

In 2023, the two sides tried to negotiate holding both events in Chinatown, one after the other, but they couldn’t find an agreement. Once again, both night markets took place on the same weekend, one in Kanata and the other in Chinatown.

In a March 2023 email shared with this newspaper, Li lamented that in 2022, he switched his dates more than once to avoid a conflict, only to have Huang revise his dates so that the night markets would compete.

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Huang in an interview says the availability of vendors from Toronto helps to dictate when night markets in Ottawa can happen.

“We draw from the same vendor pool,” he says.

There are limited dates when the vendors can come to Ottawa, as they are on a circuit of events — akin to an Asian version of the Ribfest circuit, he explains. Huang adds that he has agreements with Toronto events, such as the Taste of Asia at the end of June — which attracts 180,000 people — not to conflict with them.

Meanwhile, Huang is also staging a second Ottawa Asian Fest Night Market this summer, from July 19 to 21, at Lansdowne Park.

In a March 2023 email, Li told Huang he was welcome to hold another night market in Chinatown, in addition to the Ottawa Chinatown Night Market.

“We want to see as many community events as possible,” Li says in an interview. “I told Simon that if he wanted to host a night market in Chinatown, he’s very welcome. The door is open and the BIA would still provide him the same support.”

Huang says he considered returning to Chinatown, wanting to “come together and do what’s good for the Asian community.”

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The only condition, he says, was that he keep the event under his Ottawa Asian Fest brand.

“They said, ‘No, thank you.’ They want to do it as a BIA event. And that was it. We parted our ways.”

The email correspondence show that four conditions, proposed by Huang, were on the table.

The first was that Ottawa Asian Fest would be the only organizer of night markets in Chinatown, with the BIA as a “community partner.” Li responded that the June 2023 Chinatown night market would go ahead, with its own organizer, while Huang could “organize a night market on a later date.”

“In the long run, it is the BIA’s intention to host two night markets per year, which shall not compete against each other,” Li wrote.

Huang also asked to be given “the grant to be used for the festival.” Li responded that the BIA does not guarantee that the BIA could always provide financial support to event organizers. But he wrote that if the BIA and Huang could reach an agreement, “we’ll try our best to secure some funding for the night market, this year and (in) future years.

“For this year, I believe we can provide financial support to more than one night market,” Li wrote.

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In an interview, Li says the current Chinatown event is funded out of a $40,000 pot that covers all community events. Huang, meanwhile, says that his event is self-sufficient and operates without receiving any grants, directing all of its vendors’ fees back into the event.

In a 2023 email, Huang proposed the event he might run in Chinatown should still be called the Chinatown Night Market, “with the title sponsor of our choosing.”

“Thank you for supporting the branding of Chinatown,” Li wrote back. “The name of Ottawa Chinatown Night Market and/or its logo will be main focus of, and displayed in, all promotional content.”

The negotiations stopped soon after that and in his last email, Huang wrote: “Well, we attempted to make peace.”

In an interview this week, Huang says the deal-breaker was that the June 2023 Chinatown Night Market took place with a different organizer.

“There was no point in us coming back,” he says. “We’ve been doing this for 10 years and we worked hard for it… We put a lot of hard work in creating our own brand and we simply don’t want to be confused by anything else.”

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Now, Huang’s event bills itself as the “original Asian night market” in Ottawa, and as Ottawa’s biggest food festival. The Chinatown BIA event’s tagline is “unmatched because it is in Chinatown.”

Whatever their disagreements, Huang and Li agree that there is now, perhaps oddly, a plus to having two simultaneous Asian night markets in Ottawa.

“Having two night markets at different, faraway spots in Ottawa, we serve different audiences, I suppose,” Li says. “We provide more options for residents of different parts of the city.”

Huang says the competing, but viable, events have emerged as “mutually beneficial.

“It actually works out,” he says. “To be honest, by having two markets at the same time, in different locations… it’s actually creating more awareness of Asian culture.”

Ottawa Asian Fest Night Market
Where: Tanger Outlet Ottawa
When: Friday and Saturday noon to midnight, Sunday noon to 8 p.m.

Ottawa Chinatown Night Market
Where: Somerset Street West, between Bell Street and Bronson Avenue
When:  Friday 2 to 11 p.m., Saturday 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., Sunday 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.

phum@postmedia.com

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