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Thai Town Food Hall Opens Next Month With a Ton of Neighborhood Flavor

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The marketplace will work with the Community Development Center

Renderings for the upcoming Thai Town Marketplace
Thai CDC
Farley Elliott is the Senior Editor at Eater LA and the author of Los Angeles Street Food: A History From Tamaleros to Taco Trucks. He covers restaurants in every form, from breaking news to the culture, people, and history that surrounds LA's dining landscape.

There’s a new food hall opening up in Thai Town rather soon, but this one will have a different bent than the myriad markets that have come to crowd other parts of Southern California. The new Thai Town Marketplace is aiming to be more than just a for-profit center for any chef that feels like coming in, and will instead act as a small business outreach arm for the Thai Community Development Center.

For those unfamiliar, the Thai CDC is a cultural and community outreach center that has been focused on Los Angeles’s Thai community since 1994. The group does everything from social services to helping with business paperwork, and now they’re growing into the food hall realm by giving beginning entrepreneurs a space to make an actual living.

Per Urbanize LA, the food hall and marketplace should open late next month on top of the Metro Red Line entrance at Hollywood and Western, right next to the community’s ongoing weekly farmers markets. There’s room for 12 food stalls and more retail kiosks across 4,500 square feet inside, and the whole thing should employ close to 50 people from the area. The upstart businesses will receive training from the Thai CDC on how to keep their operation going, but no vendor will be allowed to stay more than three years, in order to allow new businesses to enter the marketplace.

The full list of vendors has not yet been made public, but a PDF of renderings, stall sketches, and more can be found here. As for an opening, expect something in late April, says Urbanize LA.

Thai Town Marketplace. 5448 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, CA.