News broke late last week the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration would be opening the Lumpini Park Hawker Center in early 2026, a new space for street food in a high foot traffic neighborhood. 

 

Construction has already begun on the new location on Ratchadamri Road at Lumpini Park Gate 5, which is set to host 88 vendors starting at 5am to midnight, providing an all-round food solution for the office and nightlife crowds. 

 

While certainly off the street, the stalls here will remain small spaces for getting a bite, with a spokesperson saying the stalls will be around 2x2 meters. Food shops will be run in two shifts, from 5am-4pm and from 4pm-midnight. 

 

The new space will not have a direct link to the nearest BTS station, which is Saladaeng Exit 6 and MRT Suan Lum Exit 1. 

 

While it’s certainly not on the sidewalk, the new area will be designed for natural air flow, so patrons should not go expecting air conditioning. Similarly, the BMA has said that, due to the location near the Chulalonkorn hospital, the roofs have been designed to reduce noise. 

 

While you’re never more than a stone’s throw away from street food almost anywhere in the city, the “sidewalk cleanup” has left a lot of vendors without anywhere to sell their fare. BMA spokesman Aekvarunyoo Amrapala said last week that priority at the new center will be given to vendors affected by the sidewalk cleanup campaigns. 

 

Bangkok’s reputation for being unwalkable has been challenged by the current crop who are instituting programs to fix the city’s sidewalks around BTS stations, with a program to build 1,000 new sidewalks starting as far back as 2002.  

 

In the last three years, Bangkok has instituted programs to cut down on the number of “lenient zones” and unregulated food stalls, dropping the number of vendors from 4,500 to 3,700 in lenient zones. The unregulated stalls have taken an even bigger hit, dropping from around 16,000 to around 9,000. The most likely to be helped by the new center will be those affected by the recent Sarasin Road sidewalk cleanup. 

 

The Lumpini Hawker Center comes as authorities look to modernize the city’s street food scene by relocating streetside stalls to more central areas in a more Singapore-like model—a move that has met with some resistance. Singapore’s hawker centers are government-run, a model that began in the 1960s, and have (relative to Singapore) low rents, however rents for stalls at the Lumpini Hawker Center have not yet been released.