The State Fair of Texas opens Friday, September 25, and runs 24 days through Sunday, October 18, at Fair Park. This is the fair’s 140th year, and the theme is “Stars, Stripes, and Howdies.” Gates open at 10 a.m. daily, closing at 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday, with last entry at 9.
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You buy 2 tubs of the same ice cream. You open the first one, and it’s exactly what you expected – rich, creamy goodness. Then you open the other one, and it’s like a Temu version of the first one. Grainy, icy, stiff, and just not good.
What happened there?
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Sweepstakes casino games excel by combining a broad range of game types with intuitive, accessible play. This approach allows players to engage quickly without steep learning curves, while still offering enough variety to satisfy both casual and dedicated users. Thoughtful interface design, streamlined onboarding, and clear tutorials reduce barriers, enabling seamless transitions from first-time trials to deeper gameplay exploration.
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Every year around this time, something starts happening to people who grew up in Dallas. They smell a deep fryer that isn’t there yet, or they catch themselves thinking about mustard, and they realize the State Fair is close. A lot of that feeling traces back to one family and one stick of fried dough at Fletcher’s, and the Fair opens next Friday, September 25, so this is as good a week as any to tell the whole story.
It starts in 1938, with two brothers who weren’t cooks at all. Neil and Carl Fletcher were vaudeville performers, sixth-generation showmen who’d spent years touring with a family act called the Madcap Players and performing at Fair Park itself in a show called “The Drunkard.” As that career wound down, fair officials offered them a food booth. Neil later told the Dallas Morning News how the idea came together: “We said, ‘Sure.’ Then, over a bottle of bourbon, we tried to figure out what we could sell there.”
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Today is National Cheeseburger Day, which is a real, official, calendar-sanctioned holiday, and also an excuse nobody needs twice. Dallas doesn’t have one burger. It has about forty of them, spread across every zip code and every price point, from a couple of bucks at a drive-in that hasn’t changed since Eisenhower to something you’d genuinely think twice about ordering unless someone else is paying. Here are five, cheapest to most ridiculous.
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Willow Bend closed for good on August 31. Nearly every store handed over its keys that day, and most of what’s left inside is headed for the wrecking ball to clear space for a $3 billion redevelopment that could someday include a Dallas Stars arena. Two restaurants stayed behind anyway. Knife Steakhouse and Mexican Bar Company are still open, still serving dinner, inside a mall that’s on its way to being demolished around them.
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Seventeen years is a long run for anything in Dallas dining, and DIFFA Dallas brings Burgers + Burgundy back on Thursday, October 1, on the Glen Lawn at The Village Dallas. John Tesar built the thing and still hosts it. The setup hasn’t changed much either. Chefs take stations on a lawn, each one builds a burger, the wine keeps coming, and the money goes to organizations doing HIV/AIDS work across North Texas.
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Happy hour burgers have a bad reputation, and most of them earn it. A restaurant slaps a discount on a sad, dry patty for two hours a day and calls it a deal. You end up paying half price for something you wouldn’t order at full price either.
That’s not what’s happening at the five places below. There’s a difference between a bar burger going cheap and a real restaurant discounting the same burger it serves all night, made the same way, by the same kitchen, just priced lower for a stretch of the afternoon. These are the second kind. And sometimes only a great burger will hit the spot.
Continue readingFiled under Crave, Steven Doyle
