The State Fair of Texas has been chipping away at the idea that a day at Fair Park has to wear out your wallet before it wears out your feet, and this year it’s making that official. Building on the reduced admission and parking pricing announced earlier this summer, the Fair just rolled out Every Day Values, presented by State Farm, a new program built entirely around showing Fairgoers where the deals actually are.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Oak & Stone is getting into the Oktoberfest spirit a little early this year, and it’s doing it with beer cheese in nearly everything. Starting September 15 and running through October 31, the McKinney restaurant is rolling out a limited-time menu built around Bavarian classics with an Oak & Stone twist, which mostly means finding new ways to work Shiner Bock and beer cheese into the lineup.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The building at 110 W. Bailey Street in Ponder has been standing since 1903, and for most of the past 78 years it has smelled like fried chicken and hot grease. That smell is back. Ranchman’s, the small-town steakhouse that once pulled Hollywood and literary royalty off the highway, reopened the first week of July under new ownership, and the people running it went out of their way not to mess with what made it famous in the first place.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The whistle sounds before you see the smoke. Then the smoke comes, curling up over farmland that Amish families have worked for generations, and a locomotive built for a different century pulls slowly into view. This is Strasburg, Pennsylvania, home to the oldest continuously operating railroad in the country, chartered in 1832. What happens over the following days is where the real trip lives.
A word of honesty before anything else: Strasburg Rail Road is not an overnight sleeper train. The signature excursion is a 45-minute, nine-mile round trip through 2,500 acres of Lancaster County farmland, out to Paradise, Pennsylvania, and back. There are no berths, no sleeping cars, nothing resembling the Orient Express. What Strasburg offers instead is something quieter and, in its own way, harder to replicate: a working piece of American railroading history, still running on steam, still passing through the same Amish countryside it always has. Built around three days, this is everything worth knowing before you go.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Fifty years ago, John Reaves wasn’t running a restaurant. He was running a roofing and construction business, and smoking turkeys and hams in his backyard as thank-you gifts for clients. The gifts got so popular he ran out of room and started storing the extras in his mother-in-law’s bathtub. A friend eventually told him he needed to just open a restaurant. In 1976, he did.
Smokey John’s Bar-B-Que and Home Cooking is still standing at 1820 W. Mockingbird Lane, and this year the family is marking half a century in business. On August 29, the restaurant is opening its parking lot and dining room for a free block party, capping a Customer Appreciation Week that runs August 24 through 29. Frost Bank is presenting the event, with support from the Mark Cuban Heroes Center and the Dallas Stars Foundation.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The smoke gets you before the building does. Turn onto Springdale Road in East Austin on a weekend morning and it’s already in the air, oak and rendered fat drifting out over the parking lot before the line even comes into view. That smell has hung over this part of the city since 2012, first out of a trailer parked in a lot on Rosewood Avenue, now out of a building that used to be a church.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Henderson Avenue has a new bar with a twang, and it landed in exactly the right spot.
Stay Darlin’ opened this summer at 2929 N. Henderson Ave., in the old Sissy’s Southern Kitchen space, right where Tecovas, McKinney Hat Company, and Rancher Hat Bar have all set up shop within a block of each other. Put a boot store on three corners of an intersection and eventually somebody opens a bar to match. Stay Darlin’ is that bar.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Loro Asian Smokehouse & Bar is closing out summer with two collaborations running at both Dallas locations through the end of August, one built for heat-seekers and one built for parents who’ve had enough of the back-to-school scramble.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
