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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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.
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There’s a reason people have been hauling their own food through the gates of the State Fair of Texas for as long as the gates have existed. The fair food is part of the deal — the corny dogs, the fried everything, the Big Tex Choice Award winners you’re going to stand in line for no matter what. But by mid-afternoon, when your feet hurt and the sun hasn’t moved and you’ve got three more hours before anyone’s ready to leave, having a real lunch spread waiting in your bag changes everything. It costs less, it gives you a moment to actually sit down, and it’s the oldest trick in the book at Fair Park.
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Abel Gonzales Jr. is East Dallas, and not in the way people say that about a neighborhood they moved to. Born in Dallas, raised on the east side, and never left. Fair Park sat close enough that the State Fair of Texas was not an annual outing so much as a season the family lived through together, first with his grandparents and parents, every year without a skip.
His father ran a restaurant, which in practice meant a man who worked constantly and rarely stopped for anything. The fair was the exception. That combination, a kitchen at home and a fairground down the road, is most of the explanation for how the rest of this went.
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Most people show up to the State Fair of Texas thinking about corny dogs and butter sculptures, and forget there’s an entire free music festival built into the ticket price. The Chevrolet Main Stage has been doing this for almost 30 years, and this year’s lineup is one of the more genre-scrambled ones the fair has put together in a while. Country one night, classic rock the next, then a Pink Floyd laser show, then a Norteño act, then a tribute band. Nobody’s pretending it’s curated for one kind of fan. It’s built for everybody who walks through the gate.
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The State Fair of Texas runs September 25 through October 18 this year, and if you live here, it’s easy to treat it like an errand: drive in, eat a corny dog, drive home. But a fair weekend deserves better than that. Turn it into an actual staycation, and the whole thing changes shape. You get a night away from your own kitchen, a dinner worth dressing up for, and a full day at Fair Park with nowhere else to be.
Here’s how to build the weekend.
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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.
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