Big names are coming to the Australian Open this year – and not just on the court.
The Australian Open has always been a summer highlight for Aussies, but next year the excitement extends beyond the arena. One of the world’s biggest burger chains has just joined the foodie line-up, rounding out a mouthwatering mix that’ll have you dashing from your seat between every set.
The headliner we didn’t see coming
The Australian Open is set to host Shake Shack’s first-ever Aussie pop-up. (Image: Visit Victoria)
It may still be a couple of months away, but the Australian Open buzz is already building, with some of the biggest names in tennis set to hit the court come 2026. But the unveiling of its food and beverage program has dialled up the hype tenfold, confirming a courtside Shake Shack pop-up exclusive to TOPCOURT and John Cain Arena.
“We’re committed to making the AO not just the best Grand Slam on court, but also the best off-court, and food and drink are central to that experience," says Tennis Australia’s Head of Product Growth and Innovation, Fern Barrett.
Originally launched in 2001 as a hot dog stand in New York City’s Madison Square Park, the brand has since gone global thanks to its elevated take on fast food classics. Now there are over 500 locations worldwide, unfortunately, none of which are in Australia – until now. But only until 1 February.
The original hot dog stand has evolved into a restaurant in NYC’s Madison Square Park. (Image: Getty/Andrea Astes)
“For many fans, their first Shake Shack burger or shake will be part of their AO 2026 experience, which is so exciting. Shake Shack’s arrival at the AO underlines how much this event has grown beyond the court, it’s a festival of food, sport and culture," continues Barrett.
As well as dishing up a range of its beloved burgers, including the signature ShackBurger, the pop-up will serve an exclusive AO Shake, only available at TOPCOURT. While specific flavours haven’t been revealed, previous AO exclusives such as the Peach Melbourne dessert (which will be available again in 2026) are a sign of good things to come.
What else is on the AO menu?
Shake Shack is known for its elevated take on American classics. (Image: Getty/Ant DM)
The rest of the food and beverage program spans multiple Melbourne Park precincts and is sure to tantalise taste buds – from global brands to local favourites and specialties that can only be found at the Australian Open.
Nearby at the Western Courts, an express food outlet will cater to fans who want fast, high-quality meals without missing out on the action. Already confirmed is Japanese-inspired eatery Suupaa , delivering its signature konbini (convenience store) food with a Melbourne twist. Think onigiri, katsu sandos, noodle bowls and fried chicken.
Shane Delia will man a pop-up heroing Middle Eastern flavours from his new Brisbane restaurant, Layla.
Grand Slam Oval is turning into a multicultural food festival, featuring seven cuisines. Returning favourites include D.O.C, Fishbowl and Stalactites, which is teaming up with local culinary legend Angie Giannakodakis to create a Greek menu exclusive to the AO. Newcomers Season Chicken, Ho Jiak and Jollygood will make their AO debuts at Grand Slam Oval, too.
Some of Australia’s most celebrated chefs and hospitality brands, as well as international Michelin-star icons will be cooking it up at AO Reserve, the Australian Open’s premium hospitality experience. Think acclaimed Brisbane restaurants like SK Steak and Oyster and Shimpei Raikuni, as well as Caretaker’s Cottage, one of the most awarded cocktail bars in the country.
The Melbourne Park precinct comes alive each year for the sporting event. (Image: Visit Victoria)
Rodney Dunn and Severine Demanet of Tassie’s Agrarian Kitchen will be on-site at AO Reserve, too. The pair will work alongside names like Simon Rogan of L’Enclume and Umbel, Bennelong’s Peter Gilmore and Alejandro Saravia of Farmer’s Daughters.
And believe it or not – that’s just the beginning. From live music and roving entertainment to a jumbo waterslide and daily giveaways, the 2026 Australian Open is shaping up to be the best yet.
The details
Guests keen to try Shake Shack should head to TOPCOURT. (Image: Lucas Richarz)
The 2026 Australian Open will run from 12 January – 1 February at Melbourne Park in Victoria’s capital. The main sporting venues include Rod Laver Arena, Margaret Court Arena and John Cain Arena, while precincts like Garden Square, Grand Slam Oval and Western Courts will host off-court events. Guests keen to try Shake Shack can find its pop-up at the TOPCOURT precinct.
The best way to get to the Australian Open is via public transport, with trams, trains and buses all running to Melbourne Park throughout the event. If you’re driving, off-site parking can be found at Yarra Park for $10, subject to capacity. Tickets for all matches and events are on sale now and can be purchased via the AO website.
Taylah Darnell is Australian Traveller's Writer & Producer. She has been passionate about writing since she learnt to read, spending many hours either lost in the pages of books or attempting to write her own. This life-long love of words inspired her to study a Bachelor of Communication majoring in Creative Writing at the University of Technology Sydney, where she completed two editorial internships. She began her full-time career in publishing at Ocean Media before scoring her dream job with Australian Traveller. Now as Writer & Producer, Taylah passionately works across both digital platforms and print titles. When she's not wielding a red pen over magazine proofs, you can find Taylah among the aisles of a second-hand bookshop, following a good nature trail or cheering on her EPL team at 3am. While she's keen to visit places like Norway and New Zealand, her favourite place to explore will forever be her homeland.
The Grampians just might be the ultimate antidote for the metropolis, writes one returning Aussie ready to disconnect from the modern world and reconnect to the Great outdoors.
There are no kangaroos back in Chicago: they’re all here in the Grampians/Gariwerd . In the heart of the Grampians National Park’s main gateway town, Halls Gap, pods of eastern greys are eating grass beside my parked rental car beneath the stars. Next morning, when I see the backyard of my rented villa on the edge of town for the first time, there are kangaroos feeding beside a slow-moving creek, lined with river red gums.
Five hundred metres up the road, 50 or so of them are eating by the side of the road in a paddock. I pull over to watch and spot three emus. Yellow-tailed black cockatoos fly overhead towards the tall green mountains just beyond town.
‘Kee-ow, keee-oww’… their calls fuse with the maniacal cackle of a kookaburra (or 10). Gawd, how I’ve missed the sound of them. Far above, a wedge-tailed eagle watches, and there you go: the ‘great birds of Australia’ trifecta, all half a kay from the town limits.
Exchanging city chaos for country calm
The park is renowned for its significant diversity of native fauna species. (Image: Visit Victoria/Robert Blackburn)
I’ve come to the Grampians to disconnect, but the bush offers a connection of its own. This isn’t just any bush, mind you. The Grampians National Park is iconic for many reasons, mostly for its striking sandstone mountains – five ridges run north to south, with abrupt, orange slopes which tumble right into Halls Gap – and for the fact there’s 20,000 years of traditional rock art. Across these mountains there are more than 200 recorded sites to see, created by the Djab Wurrung, Jardwadjali and Gunditjmara peoples. It’s just like our outback… but three hours from Melbourne.
I’ve come here for a chance at renewal after the chaos of my life in America’s third-largest city, Chicago, where I live for now, at the whim of a relative’s cancer journey. Flying into Melbourne’s airport, it only takes an hour’s drive to feel far away from any concept of suburbia. When I arrive in Halls Gap two hours later, the restaurant I’m eating at clears out entirely by 7:45pm; Chicago already feels a lifetime ago.
The trails and treasures of the Grampians
Grampians National Park /Gariwerd covers almost 2000 square kilometres. (Image: Ben Savage)
Though the national park covers almost 2000 square kilometres, its best-known landmarks are remarkably easy to access. From my carpark here, among the cockatoos and kangaroos on the fringe of Halls Gap, it only takes 60 seconds’ driving time before I’m winding my way up a steep road through rainforest, deep into the mountains.
Then it’s five minutes more to a carpark that serves as a trailhead for a hike to one of the park’s best vantage points, The Pinnacles . I walk for an hour or so, reacquainting myself with the smells and the sounds of the Aussie bush, before I reach it: a sheer cliff’s edge lookout 500 metres up above Halls Gap.
Overlooking the vast Grampians landscape from Hollow Mountain. (Image: Robert Blackburn)
There are hikes and there are lookouts and waterfalls all across this part of the park near town. Some are a short stroll from a carpark; others involve long, arduous hikes through forest. The longest is the Grampians Peaks Trail , Victoria’s newest and longest iconic walk, which runs 160 kilometres – the entire length of Grampians National Park.
Local activities operator Absolute Outdoors shows me glimpses of the trail. The company’s owner, Adrian Manikas, says it’s the best walk he’s done in Australia. He says he’s worked in national parks across the world, but this was the one he wanted to bring his children up in.
“There’s something about the Grampians,” he says, as he leads me up a path to where there’s wooden platforms for tents, beside a hut looking straight out across western Victoria from a kilometre up in the sky (these are part of the guided hiking options for the trail). “There are things out here that you won’t see anywhere else in Australia.” Last summer, 80 per cent of the park was damaged by bushfire, but Manikas shows me its regrowth, and tells me of the manic effort put in by volunteers from town – with firefighters from all over Australia – to help save Halls Gap.
Spot wildflowers. (Image: Visit Victoria)
We drive back down to Halls Gap at dusk to abseil down a mountain under the stars, a few minutes’ walk off the main road into town. We have headlamps, but a full moon is enough to light my way down. It takes blind faith to walk backwards down a mountain into a black void, though the upside is I can’t see the extent of my descent.
Grampians National Park at sunset. (Image: Wine Australian)
The stargazing is ruined by the moon, of course, but you should see how its glow lights up the orange of the sandstone, like in a theme park. When I’m done, I stand on a rocky plateau drinking hot chocolate and listening to the Aussie animals who prefer nighttime. I can see the streets of Halls Gap off in the distance on this Friday night. The restaurants may stay open until 8pm tonight.
What else is on offer in The Grampians?
Travelling along the Wimmera River in Dimboola. (Image: Chris McConville)
You’ll find all sorts of adventures out here – from rock climbing to canoeing to hiking – but there’s more to the Grampians than a couple of thousand square kilometres of trees and mountains. Halls Gap may be known to most people, but what of Pomonal, and Dimboola, and Horsham? Here in the shadow of those big sandstone mountains there are towns and communities most of us don’t know to visit.
And who knew that the Grampians is home to Victoria’s most underrated wine region ? My disconnection this morning comes not in a forest, but in the tasting rooms and winery restaurants of the district. Like Pomonal Estate, barely 10 minutes’ drive east of Halls Gap, where UK-born chef Dean Sibthorp prepares a locally caught barramundi with lentil, pumpkin and finger lime in a restaurant beside the vines at the base of the Grampians. Husband-and-wife team Pep and Adam Atchison tell me stories as they pour their prize wines (shiraz is the hero in these parts).
Dine in a restaurant beside vines at Pomonal Estate. (Image: Tourism Australia)
Three minutes’ drive back down the road, long-time mates Hadyn Black and Darcy Naunton run an eclectic cellar door out of a corrugated iron shed, near downtown Pomonal. The Christmas before last, half the houses in Pomonal burnt down in a bushfire, but these locals are a resilient lot.
The fires also didn’t stop the construction of the first art centre in Australia dedicated to environmental art in a nature-based precinct a little further down the road (that’s Wama – the National Centre for Environmental Arts), which opened in July. And some of the world’s oldest and rarest grape vines have survived 160 years at Best’s Wines, outside the heritage town of Great Western. There’s plantings here from the year 1868, and there’s wines stored in century-old barrels within 150-year-old tunnels beneath the tasting room. On the other side of town, Seppelt Wines’ roots go back to 1865. They’re both only a 30-minute drive from Halls Gap.
Great Western is a charming heritage town. (Image: Griffin Simm)
There’s more to explore yet; I drive through tiny historic towns that barely make the map. Still part of the Grampians, they’re as pretty as the mountains behind them: full of late 19th-century/early 20th-century post offices, government offices and bank buildings, converted now to all manner of bric-a-brac stores and cafes.
The Imaginarium is one, in quirky Dimboola, where I sleep in the manager’s residence of an old National Australia Bank after a gourmet dinner at the local golf club, run by noted chef and teacher, Cat Clarke – a pioneer of modern Indigenous Australian cooking. Just south, I spend an entire afternoon at a winery, Norton Estate Wines, set on rolling calico-coloured hills that make me think of Tuscany, chit-chatting with owners Chris and Sam Spence.
Being here takes me back two decades, when I lived here for a time. It had all seemed as foreign as if I’d driven to another planet back then (from Sydney/Warrane), but there seemed something inherently and immediately good about this place, like I’d lived here before.
And it’s the Australian small-town familiarity of the Grampians that offers me connection back to my own country. Even in the better-known Halls Gap, Liz from Kerrie’s Creations knows I like my lattes with soy milk and one sugar. And while I never do get the name of the lady at the local Ampol station, I sure know a lot about her life.
Kookaburras are one of some 230 bird species. (Image: Darren Donlen)
You can be a local here in a day; how good is that? In Chicago, I don’t even know who my neighbour is. Though each day at dusk – when the kangaroos gather outside my villa, and the kookaburras and the black cockatoos shout out loud before settling in to sleep – I prefer the quieter connection I get out there in the bush, beneath these orange mountains.
A traveller’s checklist
Staying there
Sleep beside the wildlife on the edge of Halls Gap at Serenity .
