Crucially for marketgoers, he has imposed a $5 price cap per dish (with a $6 exception for a few vendors whose margins are “razor thin”). This encourages smaller portion size and grazing, so I was able to try a dozen booths on each visit. I still mourned all that I had missed.

Some pleasures I may never know again, like slippery sweet-potato noodles glossed with black vinegar and chile oil and betraying a throb of Sichuan peppercorn, from a stall whose sign sadly proclaimed, “This is our last week.” (Please return next summer.)

Among the snacks and dishes to search and hope for is fuchka, delicate semolina shells lined with a mash of yellow peas and chile and sluiced with tamarind so they are sour-sweet and earthy-hot all at once. This is served under the banner of Jhal NYC, which is half food stall, half social enterprise. The two young men who run it — Queens-born and of Bangladeshi descent — hire recent immigrants and stay-at-home mothers to make the food, as a way of helping them gain footing in the city and a sense of independence.

At the Malaysian Project, the burger pays homage to the beloved Ramly chain in Kuala Lumpur. A compact patty of beef or chicken, suffused with a profoundly warm curry blend, is folded inside a yellow-white tie-dye of egg cracked right on the grill, then slid into a bun slaked with brown butter and chile mayo. I ate mine standing, in silence.

But I had to keep going, because I also wanted skewers of beautifully tender beef hearts from the smoky Bolivian Anticuchos booth, and Persian love cake from Sweet Zahra, a brief glissando of cardamom and rose water, already a memory even as I ate it.

At Joon, there is the crispy rice called tahdig in Farsi, molded into hollow cups to be filled with fesenjan, a stew whose brooding sweetness comes from long-simmered pomegranate juice. It was ladled in while the vendor’s Iranian mother-in-law watched from the sidelines, approvingly.