Still cool, or so 2015? The food truck parks that keep on truckin’

Following a taste bud-awakening jaunt to the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas in 2012, hospitality gurus Myles Munro and Daragh Kan flew home to Melbourne with food truck fever.  

Champing at the bit to replicate similar vibes down under, the pair found a disused petrol station in Melbourne’s industrial heartland and set to work transforming the site into a culinary destination.   

A decade on, Welcome To Thornbury remains one of Melbourne’s most popular permanent food truck locations. Even though the millennial hipsters who first frequented the venue are now likely to visit with their young kids in tow, “Welcome To” – as it’s known by locals – continues to attract a crowd. 

The 4000-square-metre venue hosts a rotating collection of food vendors and feeds up to 700 hungry patrons a night. It even boasts its own in-built 200-seater bar where customers can enjoy cocktails, wine and beer on tap.  

Reflecting on his transformative trip to Austin, Myles Munro recalls being “blown away” by the US city’s vibrant food truck scene. 

Welcome to Thornbury in Melbourne has gone from strength to strength. Picture: Instagram/Welcome to Thornbury 

“Every night we’d find ourselves eating at an amazing food truck late at night or early in the morning for breakfast, or somewhere for lunch. We we’re like, wow, there’s definitely something to this,” Mr Munro told realcommercial.com.au. 

“Obviously Melbourne already had food trucks, but they were the not-so-pleasant ones you’d find at markets selling fried food and were not overly inspiring. There was no-one doing any new wave food trucks or luxury food truck parks.” 

Enter Mr Burger: Munro and Kan’s gourmet foray into the food truck world. There was just one problem – the pair couldn’t find anywhere to trade. 

“Welcome to Thornbury was definitely driven by a lack of trading sites for our burger truck. We figured let’s find a site to rent and invite all our food truck mates to pay us some rent and we’ll run the bar, the venue and our burger truck,” Mr Munro explained.  

“We found this great site in a gentrifying area, which is technically on the cusp of Thornbury and Northcote. Luckily it all took off really quickly.”  

A complete overhaul 

Stumbling across the Welcome To Thornbury site was a “happy accident,” said Munro. 

“My business partner Pete was driving along one day and sees this big old service station. It was originally a servo in the ’70s and later it became a Morris Minor manufacturing factory. Its connection to vehicles was perfect for a food truck venue.”  

The site was extensively developed over an 18-month period to ensure it was up to code for hospitality purposes.  

“Given it was a former servo, at one point there was a discussion with council around having to remediate the soil for the entire site to make it compliant for food and beverage. That would’ve been a massive undertaking … so thankfully we didn’t have to do it in the end,” recalled Munro.  

Careful consideration was given to retaining the site’s character and preserving some of its hallmark features. 

Welcome To Thornbury in Melbourne’s inner-north. Picture: Instagram/Welcome to Thornbury

“The old oil pits that the mechanics would stand in to service the underside of cars – we ended up glassing them over and covering them up rather than having to pull them all out,” Munro explained.  

“It was important not to completely strip it down and turn it into another homogenised building. There’s a lot of history in that site that we wanted to put on show.” 

In 2021, the Mr Burger boys replicated the success of their food truck park with a second venue, Welcome To Brunswick – a former construction storage facility.  

“That site was a lot more exposed, so we had to build a big canopy over the front of it so that it was weatherproof,” Munro remembers. 

“One of the big challenges with running hospitality venues in Melbourne is making sure you have that outdoor feel, which everyone loves, but also making it weatherproof so people can know that they can come whether rain, hail or shine.” 

A woking amazing vendor 

Woking Amazing has been one of Welcome To Thornbury’s most popular food vendors from almost the very beginning. 

The all-vegan stir fry sensation originally began operating at the venue as a marquee stall in 2015, before taking over a food truck in 2019. 

Owner Kat Wang also takes her beloved food truck to events and festivals all across Victoria, though Welcome To Thornbury has remained one of her semi-permanent homes. 

Woking Amazing was one of the original trucks at Welcome to Thornbury. Picture: Instagram/Welcome to Thornbury

“A lot more street trading locations have popped up around the city in the last ten years, but they can be quite expensive to rent, so it’s great to have venues like Welcome To Thornbury where we can always trade at,” said Ms Wang.  

“We have a great longstanding relationship with those guys. And we’ve also recently built a new relationship with Urban Ground – another of the larger food truck parks in Melbourne.” 

A sustainable approach

Launched early 2021 in the beachside suburb of Mordialloc, Urban Ground is a dining precinct also born from industrial roots, in this case an old Mitsubishi wrecker site.  

The day-to-night venue is home to a plant-based café, a fruit-based distillery, open-air beer garden, and, of course, a food-truck park hosting a rotating weekly roster of food operators.  

Co-founder Xavier Nalty’s grand vision for Urban Ground was to transform the industrial area into a garden oasis, which was brought to life by Melbourne-based studio Breathe Architecture. 

Urban Underground opened in 2021. Picture: Supplied

“Everything we tried to do was with minimal impact to the environment,” Mr Nalty said. 

“Our building materials were repurposed, we planted nearly 200 trees all in the gardens and we put in 4,000 litres worth of rain tanks for the distillery and to help water the gardens.” 

The project took a few years to complete, with a whole year dedicated to planning and getting a permit approved. 

“These industrial spaces were created for commercial purposes, so there’s a lot of red tape involved to change the land use,” Nalty explained.  

“And of course we had a few people that didn’t like the idea so much at first, but they came around. There was a lot of backwards and forwards to get it over the line.”