The FIFA World Cup 2026 opened yesterday in Mexico City and it does not slow down from here. Dallas is one of 11 United States host cities and AT&T Stadium in Arlington is one of the tournament’s anchor venues — nine matches in total, including a semifinal on July 14 that will be one of the most watched sporting events on the planet. The city has been building toward this for three years. The next five weeks are the payoff.
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Cedar Springs Road in Oak Lawn is Dallas’s LGBTQ+ district, and it has been since the 1970s. The half-mile stretch between Oak Lawn Avenue and Wycliff Avenue — known locally as The Strip — packs more bars, restaurants, and community institutions into a walkable corridor than any comparable neighborhood in the American South. It earned official state recognition as an LGBT neighborhood in 2018, the first in Texas. During the World Cup, when visitors arrive from countries where LGBTQ+ life ranges from restricted to illegal, Cedar Springs is the kind of neighborhood that reminds people what a city can choose to be. Everyone is welcome here. That is not a slogan. It is the operating condition of the place.
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Most people planning to view soccer think of smoky sports bars, greasy food and cheap beer. However, savvy planners for the most elegant way to watch the world’s largest sporting event will instead call III Forks in Addison to utilize one of the restaurant’s two private dining rooms.
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Uptown Dallas is the neighborhood that runs north from downtown along McKinney Avenue and Cedar Springs Road, and it is the most densely restaurant-packed corridor in the city. The McKinney Avenue Trolley runs free through the middle of it. Most of the major World Cup hotels sit on its southern edge. For visitors who want to stay in one neighborhood and eat well for three days without repeating themselves, Uptown is the answer. It has everything from a Gulf Coast seafood institution that opened the year Gerald Ford was president to a Michelin-starred French bistro that earned its star 48 days after opening. Both are worth your time.
Be mindful that lunch spots may also be great for dinner as well.
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Knox-Henderson runs roughly from the Katy Trail east along Knox Street and down Henderson Avenue, and on a good evening it is one of the most concentrated stretches of good food and drink in Texas. The neighborhood sits three miles north of downtown, bordered by Highland Park to the west and Uptown to the south, and for World Cup visitors it offers something the other Dallas neighborhoods don’t: the full range from a dive bar that’s been there since 1987 to a Michelin-recognized steakhouse, all within comfortable walking distance of each other. Park once. Stay all night.
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Most World Cup visitors staying in Dallas will be staying downtown. The hotels are here — the Omni, the Thompson, the Sheraton, the Adolphus, the Westin — and so is the AT&T Discovery District, the pedestrian zone along Commerce and Main Streets that has become the city’s most active public gathering space. Downtown Dallas is not what it was ten years ago. The restaurant density has grown considerably, the quality has followed, and for visitors without a car it’s entirely possible to eat well for an entire week without leaving the neighborhood on foot.
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Dallas is hosting more FIFA World Cup matches than any other city in the tournament — nine games at AT&T Stadium in Arlington starting June 14, including a semifinal on July 14. That means fans from Argentina, England, Japan, the Netherlands, Croatia, Jordan, Austria, and Sweden are all coming here, many of them for the first time. They are going to eat. The question is where you point them, and more importantly, where you go yourself when you want to eat in the spirit of what is happening.
Here is what to eat for each nation playing in Dallas this summer — and where to find it.
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