Somewhere around Sunday afternoon, Big Tex is going to say goodbye for another year, and the whole city will feel it a little. This is the last weekend of the State Fair, the first weekend that actually feels like fall, and one of those rare stretches on the North Texas calendar where every corner of the Metroplex has something worth leaving the house for. Here’s how to spend it, and where to eat and drink along the way.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The State Fair of Texas is down to its last week, and this year it has something to prove.
Last fall was rough. The 2025 Fair drew 2,020,064 people, roughly 400,000 fewer than the year before, and that was the lowest turnout in at least eight years. Fair officials blamed the economy and the heat. Fairgoers mostly blamed their receipts. Social media was full of price complaints that October, and families told reporters they had stayed home because they simply could not afford a day at Fair Park.
Fair president Mitchell Glieber went before the Dallas City Council afterward and said pricing would be a priority for 2026. The Fair only controls admission and parking. Vendors set their own prices for food and games. Still, you can see the effort this year.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Most people do the State Fair of Texas the same way every year. Say hello to Big Tex, ride the Texas Star, find this year’s fried oddity, grab a corny dog, and head home full and sunburned. That is a perfectly good day. But Fair Park is 277 acres of Art Deco buildings, gardens and museums, and a lot of the best of it sits a few steps off the Midway, where the crowds never seem to look. With the Fair running through October 18, here is where to wander.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Saturday is the day half of Dallas has been circling since August. Texas and Oklahoma meet at the Cotton Bowl on October 10 with a 2:30 p.m. kickoff on ABC or ESPN, and the whole thing plays out in the middle of the State Fair of Texas, the way it has every year since 1929. This is the 97th straight meeting at the Fair, and the contract keeps the game at Fair Park through 2036. Texas won last year’s game 23-6, so Sooner fans arrive with something to prove.
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North Texas doesn’t do quiet weekends in late September, and this one might be the busiest of the fall. The State Fair opens Friday. There’s a German festival in McKinney, a Broadway legend at the Meyerson, a honky-tonk headliner at Billy Bob’s, a baseball team that dances between pitches and the Indigo Girls downtown on Sunday night. Here’s how to pace yourself, where to eat and a few tips that’ll save you money and aggravation.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The paddlewheel is turning again at Fair Park.
If you grew up going to the State Fair, you know the Old Mill Inn by sight. It’s the timber-and-stone building on Grand Avenue with the big water wheel out front. After the pandemic it went dark and stayed that way for years. This fair season it’s open again as a full-service restaurant and bar, and when the gates open on Friday, September 25, it will be feeding anyone who needs a break from the Midway.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
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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The State Fair of Texas picks up a new vendor most years, and this year one of them is making a case for a dish Fair Park has mostly ignored. Tanya Rose runs Pierogizilla LLC, and her booth on the Funway is serving fried pierogies built around her Pennsylvania and Polish background, a food that has fed families in this country for more than a century without ever quite making it onto a State Fair menu before.
Continue readingFiled under Crave
