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.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
S&D Oyster Company turns 50 on September 16, and it’s throwing itself an anniversary week worth planning around. The Uptown seafood spot has been serving the same stretch of McKinney Avenue since 1976, and five decades in one location is rare enough on its own to be worth celebrating properly.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Two years is a long time for a restaurant to sit half-announced. Docent Steak & Lounge first surfaced in Dallas back in the spring of 2024, promising samurai armor, a Kobe beef program, and a “museum-like” dinner unlike anything else in the Harwood District. Then it went quiet. The website stalled on a summer 2024 opening date that never happened, the socials went dark, and for a while it looked like the whole thing had quietly stalled out. It hadn’t. Docent is finally opening this fall, and Harwood Hospitality Group held onto every bit of ambition from that original announcement.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
There’s a restaurant style Dallas doesn’t make anymore, the kind with mismatched art on the walls, bottomless coffee that never seems to stop coming, and a crowd that ranges from college kids nursing a hangover to grandparents who’ve been coming since the place opened. Cafe Brazil is one of the last ones still doing it exactly right, and it’s been doing it since December 1991.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
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
Al Biernat’s is finally doing something it hasn’t done in almost thirty years: crossing over into Fort Worth. The Dallas steakhouse just signed a lease on a building at 913 Houston St., across from the Flat Iron Building and directly opposite where the city’s new Convention Center ballroom is going up. It’ll be the restaurant’s third location, and its first outside Dallas proper.
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
In February 2016, Isaac and Lauren Hadley spent what savings they had on an old ambulance. They hauled it into Isaac’s parents’ backyard, stripped it down, and repainted it into something that no longer looked like it belonged to a hospital. What came out the other end was a food truck, and what it served was Hawaiian-style shrimp plates built on flavors the Hadleys had picked up during four years at BYU-Hawaii, where they’d fallen for the shrimp trucks lining Oahu’s North Shore.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
