Sapa Market for Exotic Food and Shopping

Sapa Market means exotic food and shopping! Are you a gourmet and is your favourite cuisine Vietnamese cooking? Book a flight to Prague, indeed PRAGUE, and not Hanoi, and you will have a wide choice of Vietnamese restaurants. If you want to eat bun ca, a fish soup so delicious that you will order a second helping, make a beeline for the Sapa Market and experience a complete immersion in Asian culture. Afterwards, go shopping in one of the many textile and convenience stores run by Vietnamese people and pay wholesale prices.

Sapa Market for Food and Shopping

If you like Vietnamese food and exotic shopping, be sure to visit the Sapa market. Here you will find both wholesale and retail trade. In fact, Sapa is much more than a market. It is a city within a city with shops, restaurants, cafés, a school and a temple. This is the place where the Vietnamese community of Prague meets, eats and shops. The Sapa Market consists of halls with small shops, buffets, eateries and grocery shops scattered all over the grounds. Not only can you buy here inexpensive textile products, you can also buy exotic herbs, unfamiliar vegetables and fruit including the renowned odorous durian fruit, dried mushrooms, large sacks of rice, noodles and many other groceries that you may never have heard of.

Sapa Market and Shopping

The Vietnamese grocery stores stock all essentials for Asian cooking: fish sauce, rice noodles, coriander and MSG an ingredient indispensable in Asian cuisine. Angel’s Korean Mart Store is good to stock up on sesame oil, bamboo sticky rice, ginger, dried and packaged medicinal herbs at a much more affordable price than in the Vietnamese convenience stores closer to Prague centre. If you need a rice steamer or rice cooker, the grocery stores have them in all sizes and prices. Their warehouses spill over with women’s fashion, men’s suits, scarves, bags, quilts, embroidered jackets and woven skirts often hand-made. They sell gadgets such as key chains, wallets, spectacles and phone cases. There are kitchenware, utensils, plates, cups and bowls. They have board games and toys from teddy bears to life-size dolls and pedal cars. Come at Christmas for delightful Christmas decorations.

Restaurants and Street Food

Does kho with du’a chua, bun ca and ca tim xao tom thit sound like music to you? Then Sapa Market is your place to be. The first dish is fish with spicy vegetables, the second is a fish soup and the third is eggplant with minced meat and tiger prawns. The Vietnamese food found at Sapa is cheap and authentic. No frills in the tiny food stalls that are the spitting image of food stalls on any street corner in Vietnam. The aroma of Asian spices that invade the air scream: Vietnam. Walking through the streets in the complex, make you forget that you are in Prague and not in the Far East.

Vietnamese People in Prague

Why are there so many Vietnamese restaurants and shops in Prague? That is very easy to explain. From the middle of the twentieth century onward, Prague has been ‘home’ for a very large Vietnamese community. At the time of Communism, Czechoslovakia invited many migrant workers and students from Vietnam, a friendly communist regime. The idea was that the workers and students should return and use their acquired knowledge in their home country. But, after the fall of communism in 1989, they remained permanently in Prague.

Vietnamese Convenience Stores

Many Vietnamese people own convenience or textile stores or have their own Vietnamese restaurant. They get their stock at the Sapa Market, which is both a wholesale and retail market. Almost all merchandise is imported from Vietnam. Shopping at the Sapa market is quite an adventure: sometimes you will have to work your way through empty boxes and other packaging materials to get into a store brimming with Asian goods. Sapa Market has an abundance of eateries, all equally good and tasty. Choose one whose menu you like best.

Address

Sapa Market is located in Prague 4, a suburb in the south of the city. Take metro line B to Smichovske Nadrazi (Smichov Station) and then get on bus 198, get off at the Libus stop.

TTTM Sapa Market
Libusska 319/126
Prague 4

Opening Hours
7 days a week: 08.00 – 18.00 hours

Photos Marianne Crone