What's Good at the Friday Night Market 

The first Friday Night Market of the season crossed light sabers with the Forest Moon Festival on May 31, packing Old Town's closed streets with vendors and Vaders, buskers and Wookiees. Favorites returned, like Frybread Love's Indian tacos, the empanadas from La Colombiana and, yes, that's the mobile fryer of the Love Mini Donuts stall you smell. Nicaraguan Food's tamales and pupusas are now served out of a sweet, blue trailer resembling a hybrid old-fashioned lunch pail/postal box, and the line at the Pineapple Express truck bodes well for its upcoming restaurant at the former Humboldt Soup Co. spot. Among the new and new-ish stalls, a trio slated to be regulars at the market stand out.

Seoul Sizzle

If you are not hosting or invited to a Korean backyard barbecue this summer, the beef bulgogi lunch plate from Seoul Sizzle ($15) may hold back the despair. (If you are indeed hosting such a cookout, my DMs are wide open.) At the back of the tent, onions and thin sliced, marinated beef sizzle and smoke on a mobile flat-top grill, giving both a light char. The seasoning hits the traditional soy sauce and garlic, but leans more salty than sweet and soulfully satisfying with a heap of steaming short-grained white rice.

Sidebar: I'm not trying to denigrate the potato — eternal respect for her royal subterranean starchiness in all her myriad forms — but nothing takes up and amplifies savory, fatty meat juices from the pan like sticky white rice. (*Raises lighter, bows head.) Here, it expands the deep flavor of the bulgogi and the sweet onions browned in its fat.

The perfect foil for all this is the quick kimchi cucumber side and the little spring mix salad with miso dressing. The latter might be the palate cleanser you need to prepare for the next stall.

Food with Hoy

Alex Hoy's shapeshifting street stall and catering venture, having already pressed out some of the best smash burgers in the county, takes its new form under a custom red and black tent with a menu recalling the foods he grew up eating and cooking for family and friends, mainly Chinese and Japanese ingredients paired with Southeast Asian cooking techniques.

This week's offering of char siu pork — marinated 24 hours, smoked and grilled for a char — is a fine example. The long process makes the most of the pork's stripes of fat and sweet meat. Served atop a bowl of white rice (see above) with a topping of crunchy fried garlic and bok choy — cooked well but preserving a little snap — it's at-homey nostalgia with an extra kick ($15).

Is it cruel to dangle the char siu when it might not be around next time? Such is the gamble of a constantly changing menu. Keep an eye out for possible dumplings this week, accompanied by a sauce bar from which to sample.

Lulu's Kreations

Compared to the rippling banners declaring "Corn!" next door, Lulu's Kreations is keeping a low profile. Less modest are the stand's paper trays of puffy miniature pancakes striped with syrup and covered in an avalanche of whipped cream. The list of syrups and toppings from Oreo cookies to Mazapan offers customization, but the tres leches already set on the menu is a winner ($7 for 10 pancakes). The little pancake coins are fluffy and delicate, obscured by strawberries, tres leches and a cumulus cloud of whipped cream. And suddenly pancakes for dinner or dessert is a walkable street-food option. A problem solved before you knew you had it.

Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the arts and features editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400, extension 320, or [email protected]. Follow her on Instagram @JFumikoCahill.