Duong Dong Night Market: What to Eat, and the Price Trick to Watch For

Phu Quoc Night Market is at 6 Bach Dang Street in Duong Dong, it opens daily at 6 pm and closes at 11:30 pm, and for most visitors it is simply what happens after dark. More than 100 stalls, split into two halves: seafood and island specialities at one end, souvenirs, handicrafts and pearl jewellery at the other.

It is a good evening. It is also the single most tourist-facing place to eat on the island, and there is one pricing habit here that catches people out every night.

Per 100 grams, not per kilo

Seafood at the market is mostly sold by weight, live, from the ice. The number chalked on the board is sometimes the price per 100 grams rather than per kilogram – which makes it look like a tenth of what the plate will cost. Local guides here warn about this consistently, and it is the one thing to settle before anything goes on the grill.

So: ask whether the price is per 100 g or per kg, ask for the weight to be shown to you, and agree the total before it is cooked. That is not paranoia, it is just how buying live seafood by weight works anywhere, and the language gap makes it easier to skip.

Expect market seafood to run somewhere around 20 to 30 per cent above what the same fish costs in a restaurant away from Bach Dang Street. You are paying for the location and the theatre of it, which is a fair trade as long as you know that is what you are buying.

Cheaper things are cheap and simple. Grilled skewers go for roughly 20,000 to 30,000 VND each, candy floss 10,000 to 20,000 VND. At that end of the market there is nothing to negotiate and nothing to worry about.

What is actually worth eating here

The island’s tourism board names four things at this market, and they are a reasonable shortlist: grilled sea urchin, herring salad, vermicelli with fish cake, and whatever is on the ice cooked in front of you.

Grilled sea urchin is the one people come back for and the one to try first, because it is genuinely local and does not travel. Herring salad is the island’s own dish – raw fish, coconut, herbs, rolled at the table – and the version at the market is the easy introduction to it.

Then there is the thing that is not a dish. Phu Quoc’s fish sauce, nước mắm, carries a European Union protected designation of origin, the first Vietnamese product to hold one; the certificate was handed over on the island in 2013. That is a real piece of protected food geography and the bottles at the market are the easiest place to meet it. Bargaining 10 to 20 per cent on sauce, pepper and other packaged goods is normal and expected.

Where to be sceptical: the pearl stalls. Phu Quoc has a genuine pearl industry, and the stalls selling strings for a few euros are not part of it – cheap market pearls here are generally freshwater cultured or imitation. If a pearl is the point of the evening, buy it at one of the farms with paperwork, several of which appear in the culture and pepper farms category, 26 offers from €11.08.

And if somebody in the street offers to walk you to a restaurant, they are being paid to. Pick a place that is already full instead.

What the guided food tour adds

The Street Food Tour is €33.39, 4.9 stars from 100 reviews, three and a half hours. Most of what the food category contains is boat days that happen to include lunch; this is one of the few offers here whose subject is the eating itself. It meets at the Seashells Phu Quoc Hotel & Spa at 01 Vo Thi Sau in Duong Dong, moves between stops by tuk tuk, and takes in the night market along with barbecue skewers, banh mi, a seafood hotpot or noodles, and coconut ice cream to finish. The listing sells options with and without the food: on the included option the price covers the food, two beers, bottled water and an English-speaking guide, and €33.39 is the entry price for the listing rather than for any one option. Check which one you are selecting.

Two things it does not include: hotel pickup and drop-off, and gratuities. You get yourself to Vo Thi Sau.

Is €33.39 worth it when the food itself would cost a fraction of that? Honestly, that depends entirely on one thing: whether you would otherwise stand in front of the ice not knowing what to ask. The tour’s real product is someone doing the ordering, the weighing and the negotiating for you, plus stops chosen by a person who eats here. If you are comfortable pointing at things and asking about prices, skip it and eat for €8. If the per-100-gram business above made you tense, this is what solves it.

The food tours category holds 79 offers from €11.08 if you want to compare – the cheapest of them being sit-down workshops rather than street eating.

The evening you are giving up

This is the planning part, and it is the reason to read this before your last night rather than during it. Duong Dong’s market competes for the same slot as two other evenings, and you cannot have two of them on one night.

• The Sunset Town shows run late – Kiss of the Sea starts at 9 pm, with fireworks at 9:30 pm – at the opposite end of the island from Duong Dong. It is either that or this, and the way back needs arranging before you buy the ticket.
• Night squid fishing leaves in the late afternoon and comes back late, and dinner is on the boat.

The market is the one of the three that needs no booking, no boat and no timing, which makes it the right choice for a first evening and a poor choice for your only free one. If you are travelling with children, it also runs later than most of the island’s parks and attractions and is the easiest late outing of the three.

Two smaller alternatives sit near the market if a full food tour is too much. The chocolate factory tour and workshop is €11.08 with 4.5 stars from 86 reviews and lasts about an hour, and a coffee workshop runs €16.60. Both are daytime things that fit before the market opens at six.