Los Angeles might be a well-established food destination, but sampling all it has to offer poses a challenge in a city that sprawls 44 miles north to south.
Luckily, hungry Angelenos have MAMA’s Nightmarket to simplify the problem. Once a month, multicultural restaurants are gathered together under one roof to cook up skewers of meat, top bowls of ramen with perfectly jammy eggs, or grill cobs of corn over open flames for thousands of hungry attendees.
MAMA’s Nightmarket celebrates local restaurant gems that might otherwise be overlooked
But customers aren’t just sampling wares from spots that make the usual “Best of LA” dining guides. MAMA’s Nightmarket aims to bring attention to mom-and-pop cafes and immigrant-run businesses that often fly under the radar.
“Many of the restaurants that we truly loved in our communities were underrepresented or overlooked,” says market founder Jared Jue. “We wanted to bring them to the forefront.”
At MAMA’s Nightmarket, you’ll meet business owners like 63-year-old Anita, who came to the United States from Thailand when she was 20. To support her first restaurant in LA, she worked at a hotel in the morning before grabbing supplies for the dishes she’d spend that evening cooking for customers.
Now she runs Noodles Time in the Wat Thai Market at the Los Angeles Food Court and regularly cooks up her popular khao soi and boat noodles at MAMA’s Nightmarket.
How MAMA’s Nightmarket uses Eventbrite to grow its audience and ticket sales
Throwing this kind of event requires a lot of logistics, from permits to furniture rentals to handling overflowing garbage cans, but Jue knows he can rely on Eventbrite to take some of the burden off his hands.
“With Eventbrite, I don’t really have to think about ticketing, pricing, quantities — all of that is so simple,” says Jue. “It’s a streamlined option that allows me to focus on other parts of the event.”
Eventbrite’s hardware makes checking in attendees and selling tickets at the door a breeze for Jue and his team. Armed with scanners and iPads, his staff are ready for the hordes of hungry last-minute ticket buyers.
Eventbrite has also been key to boosting attendance, thanks to its suite of marketing tools, like built-in email and social marketing capabilities and ads, which have brought in extra interest and ticket sales. With tools like Eventbrite Ads, MAMA can swiftly promote their events across Eventbrite’s homepage, search results, and more, helping them get up to 14x more event exposure.
The first MAMA’s Nightmarket hosted around 2,000 attendees. The next attracted 2,500. At their most recent event, nearly 5,000 tried out Dan Dan noodles or Armenian lamb stew beneath a twinkling disco ball. And Jue sees Eventbrite as a key to their rapid growth — it’s a ticketing platform that he knows he can continue to grow with and expand his audience base through.
Twenty-eight percent* of tickets sold on Eventbrite come from attendees searching for things to do on the platform, so Jue knows that listing his event on Eventbrite will help him reach new audiences.
The market’s success has been a boon to the community as well. MAMA’s Nightmarket regularly provides a portion of its proceeds to Respect Your Elders, a group that serves traditional meals to the elderly in Los Angeles. After the recent Monterey Park Shooting, they contributed 100% of their market ticket sales to feed seniors living around the area of the tragedy.
Jue feels secure that the event, and its community impact, has plenty of room to expand. “Clearly, there’s an audience there that, with Eventbrite, we can grow with and continue to tap into,” he says.
*28% of Eventbrite-driven paid tickets from Q1 2023
