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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Today is National Cheeseburger Day, which is a real, official, calendar-sanctioned holiday, and also an excuse nobody needs twice. Dallas doesn’t have one burger. It has about forty of them, spread across every zip code and every price point, from a couple of bucks at a drive-in that hasn’t changed since Eisenhower to something you’d genuinely think twice about ordering unless someone else is paying. Here are five, cheapest to most ridiculous.
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Willow Bend closed for good on August 31. Nearly every store handed over its keys that day, and most of what’s left inside is headed for the wrecking ball to clear space for a $3 billion redevelopment that could someday include a Dallas Stars arena. Two restaurants stayed behind anyway. Knife Steakhouse and Mexican Bar Company are still open, still serving dinner, inside a mall that’s on its way to being demolished around them.
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Kent Rathbun has been one of the defining names in Dallas dining for the better part of three decades. He opened Abacus in 1999, followed it with Jasper’s in 2003, cooked for Queen Elizabeth and the Bush inaugural ball, beat Bobby Flay on Iron Chef America in 2008, and built a reputation that still carries weight in a city that moves on fast. These days he runs a catering operation and a barbecue venture with his wife Tracy, consults for a growing list of clients, and just helped open a restaurant in Burleson that carries his fingerprints all over it.
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For 95 years, a good many Dallas family meals started with picking up a tray. You slid it along the rail, read your way past a wall of American presidents, and tried to make up your mind before you reached the squash casserole. Highland Park Cafeteria fed this city from 1925 until the spring of 2020, and anyone who ate there can still tell you what they ordered.
Plenty of Dallas diners never stood in one of those lines, so a word about what this place was. Say cafeteria today and most people picture a school lunchroom. The old Southern cafeteria ran on its own rules. You picked up a tray and worked your way down a long counter of salads, entrées, vegetables, breads, and desserts, pointing at what you wanted while the staff behind the glass filled your plates. Everything came from scratch out of the kitchen behind the line, and you paid at the far end. At Highland Park Cafeteria, a staffer would help carry your tray to the table.
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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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The keg tap swings down on the first ceremonial barrel at Addison Circle Park on September 17, and for four days after that, Addison sounds nothing like Addison. Polka horns replace traffic noise. Lederhosen and dirndls outnumber golf shirts. A crowd that regularly tops 45,000 people by the closing hour files through the gates at 4970 Addison Circle to drink Paulaner out of half-liter steins and watch grown adults hold a full one straight out at arm’s length until their shoulders give out.
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Fall lands on the calendar this week, even if the thermometer hasn’t gotten the memo. Between a wine festival taking over Grapevine, the Cowboys’ home opener, back-to-back J. Cole shows, a ballet company built around one of history’s more scandalous writers, and a full night of gallery openings across the city, there’s enough here to fill every night through Sunday. Here’s what’s worth building a week around.
This Calander has family friendly options, date night and even singles fun-filled activities available. Check it out.
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