Mona Vale Night Markets

A Friday night market is a different proposition to a Sunday morning one. Nobody comes to Village Park at six on a Friday to do the week's shopping. They come to eat, and to let the children run off a week of school, which is exactly what the Mona Vale Night Markets are built around.

Food trucks first, stalls second

Gourmet food trucks anchor the site, with specialty desserts doing brisk work later in the evening. Around them sit market and craft stalls, and beyond those the part that decides whether a family stays or leaves after twenty minutes: kids' rides, jumping castles and carnival games. Five hours is long for a night market, and the crowd turns over completely between the early family shift and the later one.

Village Park is a good site for it. Flat, central, ringed by street parking, and big enough that the rides do not sit on top of the food queues.

Good to know before you go

Come hungry and come early if you have small children, because the queues at the popular trucks build from about half past six. Bring cash as a backup even though most trucks take cards, and bring something warm: Village Park is open ground and a winter Friday evening on the northern beaches gets cold once the sun goes. Street parking around the park is free but fills fast, so the walk in gets longer the later you leave it. Mona Vale also runs a weekly Sunday market at Pittwater RSL, which is an entirely different market with a different purpose.