Brownwood isn’t a place most Dallas or Fort Worth diners think to plan a trip around, but come October, it might be worth the three-hour drive. Feels Like Home Festival has announced the first wave of barbecue joints joining its third annual return on Saturday, October 3, 2026, and the lineup reads like a highlight reel of what’s happening in Texas barbecue right now, not just the usual suspects.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The sand at Daytona Beach is packed hard enough to drive a car on, which tells you almost everything about the place before you even unpack. This is a beach town built on speed and salt air in equal measure, twenty-three miles of white shoreline running alongside a boardwalk that still smells like fried dough and sunscreen the way it has for a hundred years. It’s louder than the quiet barrier islands further south, and that’s the whole point.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Every neighborhood should be so lucky as to have its history hold the best corner. In Deep Ellum, that corner is 2551 Elm Street, where the Knights of Pythias Temple has stood since 1916, designed by William Sidney Pittman, Texas’ first Black architect and son-in-law of Booker T. Washington. It was the first commercial building in Dallas built by, for, and with the money of Black citizens, and for more than two decades it served as the social heart of Black Dallas — its top-floor ballroom hosting dances, graduations, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers, its lectern held by the likes of George Washington Carver, while out on the street below, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lead Belly were turning Deep Ellum into the blues capital of the Southwest.
Today the building carries its architect’s name as The Kimpton Pittman Hotel, and it remains the best argument in town that a building can change jobs without losing its soul.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The fog is still sitting on the water at seven in the morning, and the pier disappears into it about halfway out. A man in waders walks the tide line with a bucket, looking for clams the way people here have for a hundred years. By ten the fog burns off, the pier reappears all 1,200 feet of it, and the smell of butter and clam broth starts drifting up Pomeroy Avenue.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Palm Beach is an easy call from Dallas — direct flight into Palm Beach International, three hours in the air, and you land somewhere that moves at a different pace entirely. Eau Resort & Spa sits in Manalapan, a small town on the barrier island just south of Palm Beach, fifteen minutes from Worth Avenue and the crowds but on seven private acres of Atlantic coastline where the beach is seaweed-free and the only noise is the water.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
There’s a moment on the Cliff Walk — maybe twenty minutes in, when the path narrows and the Atlantic opens up on your right and the back lawns of the Vanderbilt mansions stretch out on your left — when Newport stops being a place you’re visiting and becomes something you’re trying to understand. The scale of it doesn’t make sense at first. These were called cottages. The Breakers, Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s 70-room Italian Renaissance palazzo, built in 1895 with hydraulic elevators, hot and cold seawater taps in every bathroom, and a Great Hall that rises two stories under a painted ceiling — that was his summer cottage. He used it for six weeks a year.
Continue readingFiled under Crave, Steven Doyle
The case for a staycation is simple: you live twenty minutes from one of the best boutique hotels in Texas, and you’ve never actually stayed there. Hotel ZaZa has been on the Uptown Dallas skyline at 2332 Leonard Street since 2000, pulling in a two-time Michelin Key recognition for 2024 and 2025, and it remains the most personality-forward hotel in the city. The rooms alone justify the trip. Everything else is a bonus.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The water at Juanillo Beach is the turquoise that doesn’t look real until you’re standing in it. Calm, shallow, warm — the waves here are gentle enough that kids wade out without a second thought and you can actually hear the person next to you. Cap Cana sits on the eastern tip of the Dominican Republic, ten minutes from Punta Cana International Airport, inside a gated community that occupies one of the most beautiful stretches of coastline in the Caribbean. Most of the travelers who fly into this part of the island end up at the resorts in Bávaro. The ones who find Cap Cana tend not to tell anyone about it.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
