Fall in Texas is the season that actually earns its own calendar. The heat finally breaks, the State Fair takes over Fair Park, and every stage in the state, from a Fort Worth opera house to a Renaissance fair two hours from anywhere, gets busy at once. Here’s everything worth building a weekend around between now and the end of the year, from Broadway tours and opera openings in Dallas-Fort Worth to the festivals worth a road trip anywhere in Texas.
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Some lakes ask to be admired. Lake Tahoe asks to be entered. Its water holds a clarity so complete that sunlight travels fifty, sometimes seventy feet down before it surrenders, casting the shallows in a turquoise that belongs more to the Caribbean than the Sierra, and the depths in a blue so dark it reads as bottomless. Granite peaks rise around the entire basin, holding their snow into June, framing the water like something meant to be approached slowly and left reluctantly. There is a stillness that settles over the surface in late afternoon, just before the light turns gold, that no photograph quite manages to hold onto. It has to be stood in.
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Six Flags Over Texas turns 65 this year, and it was never supposed to last this long. Developer Angus G. Wynne Jr. built it in 1961 as a short-term moneymaker, a way to squeeze cash out of a parcel of land before turning it into an industrial park. He’d just visited the newly opened Disneyland and came home convinced Dallas-Fort Worth needed something similar, built around Texas history instead of a cartoon mouse.
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The best appetizers aren’t the ones with the longest ingredient lists. They’re the ones where two or three things are genuinely good and nobody got in their own way trying to do too much. Here are three that look like they came out of a real kitchen and actually take almost no skill to pull off.
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Twenty years of covering this city and the one thing that hasn’t changed is that Dallas keeps surprising people who think they already know it. What follows is every dining guide CraveDFW has published, organized by neighborhood and cuisine. Click through for the full picture on anything that interests you. We update this page as new guides go live. Check out the Master Dallas Dining Guide.
Please note, these are suggested restaurants and not every restaurant is represented. If you have a favorite missing, let us know and we can add.
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June is a good month to leave the house. Three Dallas-area hotels have programming worth circling on the calendar — a Route 66 celebration in Grapevine, an elevated happy hour in Westlake that makes oysters and caviar feel entirely reasonable on a Tuesday, and a Beyoncé-themed evening in Dallas that is exactly what it sounds like and better than you’d expect.
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There are war films that show you what war looks like, and there are war films that show you what war does to people. The Bridge on the River Kwai belongs firmly in the second category, which is why it still matters nearly seventy years after David Lean pointed a camera at a river in Ceylon and told some of the finest actors of his generation to go to work.
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Bill Katz flew Blackhawk helicopters for the U.S. Army for twenty years. His wife Johnnie spent twenty years in banking. They spent nine of those years overseas — Europe, Asia, moving every few years the way military families do. When Bill retired in 2001 they settled in the Dallas area, got regular jobs, and then Johnnie decided she wanted something of her own. In December 2003 they bought a sports bar on McKinney Avenue called Frankie’s. Within four years they had tripled the sales and turned it into the top sports bar in DFW.
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