Twilight Hawkers Market

Perth's Friday night street food market takes over Forrest Place, the public square between the Murray Street and Hay Street malls, from 4:30pm to 9:30pm through the warm half of the year. The 2025/26 season opened on 3 October and ran every Friday until 24 April, which makes it a seven-month fixture rather than a handful of pop-up dates.

More than 40 kitchens, one square

The City of Perth runs it as the Twilight Food Market, though the Twilight Hawkers Market name has stuck locally. Each week over 40 vendors set up, pulled from a roster of more than 70, so two consecutive Fridays rarely look the same. The cooking is deliberately global: Korean barbecue, Japanese pancakes, Indonesian satay, Malaysian curries, Turkish gozleme, Moroccan tagine, Colombian empanadas and Mexican burritos have all had a spot on the square. New traders join each season, recent additions including handmade onigiri, German spatzle, Chinese-Mongolian charcoal skewers with halal options, and Turkish tantuni. Live local music plays through the evening.

The scale is what separates this from a food truck night. Forrest Place is a hard-surfaced civic square rather than a park, so the market runs in a tight grid of stalls with the crowd circulating between them, and the whole thing is a two-minute walk from Perth Underground and Perth stations. For small food businesses it functions as a low-cost shopfront in the middle of the city, which is a large part of why the City of Perth keeps programming it.

Good to know before you go

Come by train or bus, because parking in the city centre on a Friday evening is the hard part of the trip and the square sits directly above Perth Underground station. Arrive before 6pm if you want to eat without queueing, or after 8pm when the crowd thins and the music is still going. Bring a card, since most traders are set up for tap payments, and expect to eat standing up or perched on the steps rather than at a table.