The cheese enchilada is the plate nobody brags about. Two corn tortillas, cheese, chili gravy. Nowhere to hide. You either have it or you don’t.
Tupinamba has it, and has had it longer than almost anybody in Dallas.
The cheese enchiladas come out on a plate hot enough that the cheese is still moving. The gravy is dark and beefy with none of the flat canned taste that ruins this dish all over town, and the tortillas hold instead of dissolving. That’s the test, and most kitchens fail it.
Brunch runs every day at Sundown, until three in the afternoon, and the mimosas are two dollars. On Lower Greenville in 2026, that shouldn’t be possible. It’s also not the reason to go, which surprised me.
Sundown at Granada has sat at 3520 Greenville Ave. since 2011, next door to the Granada Theater, both owned by Mike Schoder and Julia Garton. A restaurant attached to a music venue usually cooks like one. This one doesn’t, and it took a second visit to believe it.
There’s a brewery behind the hospitals off Harry Hines that’s been making some of the best hazy IPA in this city for eight years, and most of Dallas drives past the exit without knowing it’s there.
Celestial Beerworks is at 2530 Butler St. in the Medical District. Matt and Molly Reynolds opened it in the fall of 2018. He’d been homebrewing for years and brewing for Malai Kitchen before that. The taproom is painted up in constellations and space imagery, and every beer gets named like a lost B-side.
Crystal Smith grew up on Georgia’s favorite brunch dish, and by 2020 she’d decided it deserved a restaurant built entirely around it. She opened the first Johnny’s Chicken and Waffles in College Park, outside Atlanta, with then-husband Ne-Yo and Love & Hip Hop’s Karlie Redd backing the idea. Six years and a handful of states later, the plates are still enormous and the waffles are still stacked with more toppings than seems reasonable. Johnny’s now has two DFW locations: Dallas, open since May 2024, and Fort Worth, open since July 2025, and both are worth the drive on an empty stomach.
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.
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.
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.
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.
