Dallas, TX
The 2024 Best New Restaurants in Dallas
After two years of post pandemic disruptions and jitters, new restaurant openings boomed in Dallas in 2024, and the surge in activity hasn’t slowed down yet. More exciting places to dine and drink were scheduled to arrive as this feature went to press. But by our mid-October deadline, we’d already tasted enough good stuff to fill this feature with 11 standouts.
Some of 2024’s Best New Restaurants fit into Dallas’ long-standing image: the glamorous $20 million steakhouse, the all-American grill, tales of underdogs and first-timers pulling themselves up through sheer talent. But others defied our expectations in fun ways. There’s a luxury high-end destination—by and for Indian Americans. There’s a great new barbecue spot—whose owner just moved from Chicago this spring. Our favorite new tacos are cooked by a chef from Peru who spent most of his career serving pasta, and our favorite new pizzas come from a Ukrainian former computer wholesaler who quit his job to pursue baking.
In other words, this year saw something for everyone. Let’s dig in.
Every neighborhood needs a good bistro. “Needs” might be a strong word—a bistro is not as important as a fire station—but if you’re going to live somewhere, you’d like to know that you can take your date or your friends somewhere a little bit nice but not too fancy and have a terrific salad, a round of oysters, or a reasonably priced steak. Dress up for a special night out, or stop in because the fridge is empty; you’ll feel equally welcomed either way.
JerSean Golatt
JerSean Golatt
The Lake Highlands area lost its bistro when the oddly named RM 12:20 closed in early 2023. But the newcomer that moved into the same space, Goldie’s, has filled the gap neatly. Though the dining space is small, you can choose between the dark, romantic bar area or the more convivial side room, which replicates the look of a European cafe. Wherever you sit, you’ll have a generous selection of nice bistro wines, a phrase that here means affordable, food-friendly, and not at all cheap-tasting. The restaurant’s name comes from the wine world: an owner nicknames glasses of Champagne “goldies”, and the menu encourages you to “have a goldie.” Cute, but I do wish I could tell my friends about this restaurant without adding, “No, not the barbecue spot in Fort Worth.”
At Goldie’s, bistro classics are executed with style and aplomb. A generous bowl of mussels comes with pickled Fresno peppers and mustard seeds floating in the broth, plus plenty of dark, well-cooked fries for dunking. The pork chop is seared just right and served with a potato salad that I’d drive across town for: tiny new potatoes tossed in plenty of mustard and pickled red onions.
The best bistro food is about making the most from the least, and so is my favorite Goldie’s dish. It’s a salad of shaped cucumbers and dill plated on top of creamy avocado puree. Over the top, the kitchen tosses crumbled asadero cheese and chickpeas fried for so long that they’re darker than roasted peanuts. The result is refreshing, charming, simple without being dull, just a little different from what you expected. Kind of like the restaurant that serves it.
Kathy Tran
Every few days, the cooks at Tacos El Metro roast a whole pig. They may put its face in the kitchen window as proof. No matter how you order the roasted pork, it will be memorable. The restaurant’s signature taco, “puerco el metro,” features pulled pork topped with crispy cubes of chicharrón. Its best torta showcases pressed leg meat along with a fistful of pickled veggies. The messiest appetizer, huesitos, is a real treat: fried rib tips tossed in your choice of salsa. With salsa verde, they are finger-lickin’ good.
This restaurant is a casual collaboration between two restaurateurs with fine dining experience: Sergio Quijano and Mike García, both veterans of Julian Barsotti’s Italian food empire. (Quijano was the group’s wine director; the Peruvian American García was executive chef at Fachini.) Quijano is a Mexico City native, which is why the walls are decorated with maps and signage from the city’s metro system, and why several of the signature dishes are foods he grew up eating there. The menu is still evolving—summertime meant a lovely ceviche, and this fall brought the addition of breakfast tacos—which makes us all the more excited to return.
Kathy Tran
Kathy Tran
Aside from going whole hog, the best trait of Tacos El Metro is its commitment to fundamentals. It sources quality corn tortillas from a local shop that nixtamalizes its own heirloom corn rather than using bags of treated flour. Crisp buñuelos are fried to order and dusted in sugar. Even the borracho beans have deep flavor and a touch of pork. But not whole hog, this time. No, they feature a traditional home cooking ingredient: chopped-up hot dogs. This taco spot knows when to go all-out and when to keep it simple.
Brittany Conerly
Brittany Conerly
The samosas are served in a trio, each with a different filling, the cabbage-artichoke variety especially memorable. The paneer is roasted until golden, sliced, sandwiched with sauce, and cut into triangles, so that it looks like a mirror-world grilled cheese. The desserts are over-the-top reinterpretations of traditional sweets. The two-story dining room is opulent to the max, with a lakeside view, private spaces, and a glass wall looking into the kitchen.
There is no other Indian restaurant in Dallas like Sanjh. Its sophisticated plating, distinctive style, and intense commitment to scratch-made sauces set it apart. The cocktails bring extraordinary blasts of flavor (including hot peppers), and the price of all these qualities means that the bill can deliver surprises of its own.
Brittany Conerly
Although Sanjh is unique to Dallas, it has rivals in other American cities. Musaafer in Houston, Indienne in Chicago, and a number of New York restaurants all present Indian food with refined techniques, spectacular plating, new ideas, and unapologetic flavors. They dumped spice-level ordering and karahi serving dishes by the wayside and declared Indian food’s right to be creative, luxurious, and, yes, high-priced. They can be, frankly, even more bold in their deviations from tradition in both recipes and service.
Sanjh outclasses some of these national leaders (such as D.C.’s humdrum Rasika) while remaining more focused than others on taking traditional dishes—butter chicken, palak paneer—and raising them to new heights of craft and visual beauty. We see the potential for even more here, but we also see all the ways that Sanjh could transform Dallas food culture. It proves you don’t need to serve steak or lobster to be a successful high-end restaurant in this town. It nudges non-Indian diners to see Indian food in a glamorous light. And it serves some of the best cocktails any restaurant in this town has ever served. That’s a pretty good start.
Kathy Tran
Kathy Tran
A Greek grandmother’s recipes don’t need upgrading. What this Lovers Lane restaurant achieves is more like a cosmetic boost. Its Greek salad retains Yia Yia’s dressing recipe but brings new texture and color to the traditional mix of cucumber, olives, tomatoes, and feta. Spanakopita and moussaka are prepared just as they should be and in hearty portions big enough to share. If there’s one thing Nikki remembers from its owners’ grandparents, it’s the importance of a generous plate.
Lisa and Tom Georgalis opened this restaurant and bar as a tribute to their heritage. Their first date was to the New Year’s Eve party at their Greek church. When they tweak the classics, they do so with good taste. The dining rooms offer a variety of moods—from the Aegean blues of the bar to an amber side room with a skylight—all of them a step up from a gyro joint. The wine list showcases Greek wines at affordable prices. Whole fish is grilled flawlessly and plated over half a garden’s worth of herbs. Lunchtime’s lamb “pita pockets” arrive deconstructed, letting you build your own sandwich with the hearty stewed lamb and its citrus glaze.
Kathy Tran
Kathy Tran
But the kitchen didn’t tweak everything. The oregano used here is Greece’s native variety; the sea salt is imported from Greece. Nikki’s spanakopita, as big and well stuffed as egg rolls, are the size Tom Georgalis’ grandmother made them. If you can finish your order, she’ll be proud.
Goodwins takes longtime classics such as pork chops, tuna tartare, and crab salad, and it executes them flawlessly. It’s the sort of neighborhood restaurant that will make you consider moving to its neighborhood.
Brittany Conerly
Goodwins could fit into any neighborhood in Dallas.
Brittany Conerly
The crab salad appetizer at Goodwins, served with Ruffles-type chips.
Brittany Conerly
What’s the definition of a neighborhood restaurant? It’s the place around the corner that you go on date night and also on a night when you open the fridge, see the empty veggie crisper, and lose your will to cook. It’s the place where everybody knows how you like your martini. Maybe it’s a place so good that you start thinking about moving into their neighborhood from your own. A writer in Denver claims he once liked a bar so much that he walked around the surrounding blocks until he found a place for rent and signed the lease.
Brittany Conerly
Goodwins is like that. It offers an all-American menu, with some catering to Dallasites’ specific tastes—this city loves a spicy tuna tartare like nothing else—and some savvy marketing. (That “party dip”? It’s a Greek recipe, combining peppers, feta cheese, and dill.) The leadership team here has worked at restaurants such as The Grape, Neighborhood Services, Town Hearth, and Remedy, and they built on that experience to create a superpowered neighborhood spot.
Even the simplest preps here are thoughtfully done, like a pork chop topped with gentle pickled peppers and onions for contrast, or a slow-cooked confit chicken leg quarter that gets finished in the deep fryer for crispy skin. The steak sandwich is literally that: a glowing medium-rare steak, sliced and sandwiched. Order a paloma, and the citrus peel garnish might be wrapped around your straw.
Put simply, everything at Goodwins is what it should be. When you read a menu description and think about how good it might be to taste that food—well, you’re going to get exactly what you’re imagining. Then you’re going to drive down Goodwin Avenue, looking for real estate agents’ yard signs.
Kathy Tran
Kathy Tran
Linda and Travis Prausa love nothing more than being a two-person culinary embassy from Indonesia to Dallas. Walk into their petite Medical District restaurant and ask for a recommendation, and you’ll be regaled with savvy advice. Linda might tell you how Javanese food, her native specialty, differs from many of the other local traditions in the world’s fourth-most populous country. She’ll explain what’s meant to be spicy and what’s not.
Travis grew up in West Texas and dived into the world of Indonesian cooking when he married Linda. If you ask for recommendations, he’ll answer out of his own enthusiasm, because he just discovered these dishes himself. He might turn you on to Indonesian fried chicken, in which the bird is boiled with galangal, herbs, and spices, then battered and fried, then topped with all the crispy little bits of batter and herbs that floated to the top of the fryer. He might sneak you an extra cup of the sweet-tart chili sauce made with plenty of lime. He’ll definitely sing the praises of beef rendang, a spicy stew that is good (and hot) enough on its own, but equally thrilling in a fried rice where the tender beef practically melts into a sauce.
Kathy Tran
About half of Bali Street’s business comes from catering. The only Indonesian restaurant in North Texas, it serves a community of thousands of immigrants and also medical workers from nearby UT Southwestern who were hungry for more good Asian food in the area. That catering emphasis might explain why the dining room is small and often chaotic with boxes and stacked chairs. But the welcome you’ll receive is as warm as welcomes get, and you may soon find yourself falling for Indonesian food, making plans to come back and try the next dish, asking other customers for their favorite dishes. In other words, you’ll be following Travis Prausa’s footsteps.
Here’s an only-in-Dallas story: a passionate home baker decides to quit his computer wholesale job and open a pizza joint, and it becomes an unlikely second home for Ukrainian war refugees. Eugene Plyako has been a sourdough obsessive for decades now; he first thought about opening a pizzeria back in 2011, when his idea for a Neapolitan-style shop was beaten to market by a little place you might have heard of called Cane Rosso. I first met him on Facebook during the pandemic, as he posted album after album of his experiments with bagels, baguettes, babka, khachapuri, and, of course, pizza.
Kathy Tran
Kathy Tran
Pizzeria Carina takes up just 700 square feet and doesn’t have a dishwasher or freezer. Those constraints force the kitchen to get creative. Plyako shuffles his menu regularly, experimenting with new doughs and toppings. He’ll fold a pizza crust in half and make a sandwich out of it. He’ll take his puccia loaves, slice them in half, and build spectacular (and very filling) sandwiches inside them. This fall, he’s begun testing out Roman-style pizza al taglio, rectangular pies that you order by the (generously sized) slice.
Kathy Tran
Kathy Tran
Two things haven’t changed. One is the obsessive geekiness he brings to his craft, the near-scientific mind that drives him to constantly tweak and improve. The other is his determination to hire fellow Ukrainian immigrants, including refugees who’ve settled in Dallas since Russia’s invasion. Last Christmas, one of his employees baked him a honey cake to show her gratitude for her work at Carina. Since then, it has made regular appearances on the restaurant’s menu. A tinkerer herself, now she’s perfecting a tiramisu.
Brittany Conerly
Brittany Conerly
In some ways, Mābo offers the simplest experience of any restaurant on this list. Show up (with a reservation on Resy) at its doors, and chef Masayuki Otaka will put on a two-hour show featuring his set menu of appetizers, sashimi, and yakitori grilling. His show includes curtains that rise when the first course is ready, rolling smoke from the grill, props, and the possibility of an encore: you can add extra yakitori to your dinner for an additional charge.
Brittany Conerly
Brittany Conerly
But there’s nothing simple about this. Otaka has been perfecting his yakitori skills for decades, including for many years as the head chef of Teppo, a landmark restaurant in the history of Japanese food in Texas. He updates his menu year-round, though the changes may be subtle. This month’s grilled quail may be replaced by a slice of duck breast. You may walk away feeling new appreciation for chicken cuts like the “first wing” (the closest portion to the body) or the “oyster” (the tenderest flap of thigh).
Brittany Conerly
These theatrics come with theatrical prices: $200 per person, plus tax, tip, and drinks, which aside from bottled Japanese beer are not meant for the frugal diner. As a customer, it’s best to think of Mābo as a miniature vacation, a one-night trip to Japan. As a diner in general, think of Mābo as another sign of Dallas’ growing prowess as a city steeped in Japanese food culture. Otaka is one of the originators of that culture in our city. Even if you buy a supermarket sushi tray for dinner, you have him to thank in some small degree. But that’s nothing like seeing the man in action.
Manny Rodriguez
Manny Rodriguez
The return of Giuliano Matarese and Tiziana Cosentino might be the most heartwarming comeback story of the year in Dallas food. Their previous restaurant, Mille Lire, closed after several of its owners, and their children, died in a private plane crash.
“You don’t recover from such a thing,” Cosentino says. “But you turn all that pain into the desire to honor them, and to create something beautiful that will create joy for a lot of people, starting from that pain that will never go away.”
Manny Rodriguez
So Matarese and Cosentino decided to pivot to something casual, a restaurant where the masses could enjoy their family recipes without pomp, fuss, or added expense. At Miss Pasta, just about every dollar you spend goes into ingredients and kitchen labor rather than fancy plates (they’re paper), waitstaff (you’ll order at the counter), or high rent (it’s on the side of a Richardson strip mall). There aren’t any glitzy cocktails, and the wine choices are red, white, or rosé, all made by family friends.
Miss Pasta is all about pasta. Watch the noodles get made fresh at the counter—this used to be the meat-cutting station for a barbecue joint—and then pick from about 20 varieties. Matarese keeps most of his options simple, the way they’d be served in Italy, especially his hometown, Naples. Rigatoni catches all the bright, spicy amatriciana sauce in its curves, while the red sauce layered into the lasagna tastes of all four hours of cooking. The only new invention Matarese has on his menu is the restaurant’s signature bowl, named after Cosentino, Miss Pasta herself. It’s a combination of all her favorite things.
Kayla Enright
Kayla Enright
Kayla Enright
Kayla Enright
The sheer audacity of this guy. That’s what every other restaurateur in town can’t get over, that Wan Kim, the founder of Nuri (and owner of Smoothie King), spent $20 million of his own money to build this new steakhouse because, he says, he couldn’t find any other restaurants in Dallas he liked enough to visit with out-of-town friends. And, he adds, he doesn’t care if he ever makes the money back. The nerve!
Where Nuri’s courage fails, only a little bit, is in breaking the Dallas steakhouse mold. Instead, it reimagines our steak tradition from within, adding touches of Kim’s Korean heritage and a few dishes that nod to Smoothie King’s original home, New Orleans. Tuna tartare is a Dallas staple, but Nuri’s is served with shrimp chips; order a side of mac and cheese, and it’ll include fried Spam. Nutty and gently spicy ssamjang can take the place of steak sauce, or you might have your meat with a pat of kimchi butter. Don’t miss the side dish that fuses Cajun maque choux with Korean corn cheese, and don’t overlook the lamb chops, which are coated in Dijon and chives, then drizzled with a pot of I-never-want-anything-else cumin garlic butter.
Nuri has a clear ambition to be recognized as one of Texas’ best restaurants. That kind of thing takes time, but right now it offers the sort of new imagination and modern thinking that has been missing in our steakhouse market for years. The wood is just as dark, the wine cellar is just as deep, but something exciting is happening here.
Kayla Enright
One caveat: my service experiences at Nuri changed dramatically when I was recognized. When I was under the radar, the whole staff was warm, funny, and helpful. But when someone spotted me, servers and managers became neurotic, delivering endless menu-explanation speeches, interrupting conversations, rearranging glassware, and trying to upsell us on a $250 Australian lobster tail. The sommeliers, at least, remained expert at navigating the impressive wine cellar. Most guests will enjoy great service, but if you’re a celebrity, you might want to bring a wig.
Imagine rewinding the clock one year and telling Luis Rivera Rodríguez that in 12 months he’d be on a list of Dallas’ best new restaurants. He had never owned a restaurant or worked in one. He was about to go on a Netflix cooking competition, Barbecue Showdown, where he would be the only backyard amateur in a lineup of caterers, food truck owners, consultants, and other pros. Oh, and he didn’t live in Dallas.
JerSean Golatt
JerSean Golatt
In other words, Rivera had a heck of a year. He—spoiler alert—didn’t win Barbecue Showdown, but he gained the confidence and experience necessary to think about smoking meat for a living. Then he got a phone call from an old elementary school friend, Zach Flagg, partner and operations manager of Dallas’ Outfit Brewing. If Rivera ever wanted to set up a food service business of his own, Flagg said, he’d be welcome at Outfit anytime. At his home in Illinois, Rivera started packing his bags.
His menu at Outfit is short and sweet. Choose between smoked brisket and pulled pork and get them on a rice bowl, with a slaw and sauces influenced by his Venezuelan roots and his upbringing in Chicago’s Latino community. There’s a lot of Venezuelan flavor, a little bit of Southside Mexican, and, of course, that classic Texas brisket. On Saturdays, he’ll serve his meats and sauces in arepas, and on Sundays he offers Springfield, Illinois’ contribution to the breakfast canon, the horseshoe plate, but with smoked meat and Mexican crema. Everything on his tight menu pairs well with Outfit’s Mic Czech pilsner and Stampede, its light beer.
It’s funny. Meat Papi’s barbecue evokes Rivera’s upbringing as a Venezuelan American immigrant kid trying to find his identity in Chicago’s Mexican community. But sampling his brisket bowl at his old friend’s brewery, I can’t help but feel that Meat Papi is an only-in-Dallas experience.
This story originally appeared in the December issue of D Magazine with the headline “The Best New Restaurants.” Write to brian.reinhart@dmagazine.com.
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Brian Reinhart
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Brian Reinhart became D Magazine’s dining critic in 2022 after six years of writing about restaurants for the Dallas Observer and the Dallas Morning News.
Flashit Photography
On Wednesday, the Dallas City Council approved funding that will replace highway exit signs and road signs marking Lamar Street with new signage honoring Botham Jean, the 26-year-old Dallas accountant who was fatally shot in his own apartment by an off-duty Dallas police officer in 2018.
The $180,500 in funding for 13 signs to be installed by the Texas Department of Transportation is the final step in the street renaming that was unanimously approved by the council in 2021. The new signs will be placed at exits along Interstate 45, State Highway 310 and U.S. Highway 175.
Already, Botham Jean Boulevard signs run along the road in the Cedars, where Jean lived before he was killed.
“This street on which he chose to live and the street on which he died can serve as a lasting memory of the upstanding resident who loved Dallas so much,” his mother, Allison Jean, told the council in 2021.
Jean was shot by Amber Guyger, a Dallas police officer, after she entered his apartment believing it was her own. A Dallas jury found Guyger guilty of murder in 2019 and sentenced her to 10 years in prison. She has also been ordered to pay the Jean family nearly $100 million in a civil trial, which accused her of using excessive force.
The Jean family is seeking restitution from the city of Dallas because they argue that Dallas, as Guyger’s former employer, had a duty to defend Guyger and pay out claims brought against her. The Jean family filed suit against the city in April of this year.
On Wednesday, city council member Adam Bazaldua stated that the continued remembrance of Jean’s name is a reminder that “no one is above the law.”
“This has never simply been about changing street signs; it has always been about commemorating a life that was taken too soon,” said Bazaldua. “When driving down Botham Jean Boulevard, we are reminded of the thousands of lives lost across the country each year to senseless gun violence.”
Bazaldua said that once city leaders were made aware that some signs from the initial 2021 street name change had not materialized, the horseshoe took steps to correct the oversight “somewhat promptly.” But he acknowledged that Wednesday’s funding came on the heels of community advocacy urging the project’s completion.
Community leader Yafeuh Balogun said his organization, Community Movement Builders, began asking the city for the updated signs in September 2025. Addressing the council ahead of Wednesday’s vote, Balogun encouraged the horseshoe to vote in favor of the funds because it “would make no sense” to not follow through with the street renaming approved years ago.
“I think this is very powerful simply because driving here today, I still saw the Lamar Street Signs,” Balogun said. “I remember how powerful it was back in 2021 when the city council voted to rename Lamar Street to Botham Jean. I’d like to keep that legacy going.”
We’re less than a month out from the start of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, and North Texans volunteering in the event have received their uniforms. FOX 4’s Peyton Yager has more on that and the new hospitality tickets released today.
What is Fair Park? What is it supposed to be?
At City Hall, officials commonly refer to it as Dallas’ crown jewel. The sprawling campus of Art Deco edifices and midways has hosted an Elvis Presley concert, World Cup matches, a Martin Luther King Jr. speech and 97-consecutive Red River Rivalry games in its 140-year history. And every year, the State Fair of Texas attracts over 2 million visitors to the fairgrounds, leaving North Texas residents with their own attachments to Big Tex and the Hall of State.
The State Fair, however, only operates 24 days each fall, attendance is dropping, and the Cotton Bowl hasn’t consistently hosted major concerts since the 2000s. Structures commissioned for the Texas Centennial celebration in 1936 represented one of the largest collections of exposition-style Art Deco buildings in the world at the time, but most now sit in paint-chipped decay and need millions of dollars in repairs after years of neglect.
Questions over how to activate the grounds year-round have plagued Dallas officials for decades. City leaders have implemented plan after plan designed to maximize the campus, with most — such as the city’s now-infamous management contract with the nonprofit Fair Park First — falling short. The residential neighborhoods around Fair Park in South Dallas normally get left behind as well.
At a March Park and Recreation Board meeting, Park and Recreation Director John Jenkins called Fair Park “the toughest political issue to solve in this city.” So why does the city keep knocking its proverbial head against the wall? Fair Park’s potential isn’t up for debate. The 277-acre site sits only a few minutes away from downtown Dallas, abuts major thoroughfares like Interstate 30 and offers prime real estate that could become an economic engine for the city.
Key to the Future, Problems of the Past
Hasani Burton, a South Dallas resident and real estate investor, said unlocking Fair Park’s potential could be key to Dallas’ future.
“Here’s the reason we keep talking about it at the end of the day: it’s because of the economic potential,” Burton said. “In maximizing economic potential, flat out, we’re talking about on a local level, on a national level and as we keep aspiring to be the type of global city that we’re becoming on a global level.”
Having assumed control from Fair Park First in 2025, city officials have unveiled plans they believe will finally bring a sustainable vision to the grounds. Proposals include redeveloping parking lots into a hotel and retail district to organically create revenue for the park. The plans, they say, will bring Fair Park closer to what it should be — a year-round destination driving economic growth for neighboring communities and the city as a whole.
Dallas has struggled to keep up with the grounds for almost as long as they’ve been around. City and state officials quarreled over responsibility for Fair Park almost immediately after the end of the Centennial Celebration, and by 1985, noted Dallas architecture pundit David Dillon was comparing the city’s treatment of the 277 acres to that of an “embarrassing poor relation-eligible for periodic handouts.”
Handouts, in the form of periodic bond funding for stopgap maintenance needs, didn’t address the problem, as Dillon saw it. The real problem, “as it had been for decades,” he wrote, was the lack of a clear vision for the crown jewel’s future.
A need for an effective long-term framework was part of what drove Dallas leaders to delegate management of the grounds to Fair Park First in 2019. Billed as “public-private” at the time, the Fair Park First privatization ended after an audit found the nonprofit’s hired operations manager had misspent nearly $6 million in donor funds. By the time the City Council terminated the contract in 2024, decay was evident: maintenance requests around the park had gone unanswered, and the esplanade’s centerpiece fountain no longer spouted water.
“They didn’t change the filters for the water pumps, and it clogged all the pipes,” Daniel Wood, who represents the Fair Park area on the Park and Recreation board, said. “So it cost millions of dollars.”
After the Fair Park First contract ended, the Park and Recreation Department and the park board were tasked with leading the revitalization. Officials have tried to tackle the most pressing maintenance concerns and added events like weekly farmers markets in an attempt to turn the traditionally seasonal venue into an everyday asset for residents.
Still, the park’s $50 million plus in estimated deferred maintenance needs far exceed the department’s financial resources. Fair Park Coliseum needs over $3 million in repairs alone, while the expected total to repair the music hall sits at roughly $1.6 million.
Wood pointed to the city’s dubious track record of maintaining its buildings. That record is well documented and has persisted in recent years amid the debate over the future of Dallas City Hall. Reports estimate the building needs more than $350 million in deferred maintenance, as part of a $1 billion-plus total expected to fully modernize I.M. Pei’s brutalist city headquarters.
“We’re not 100% in the clear either, because it was under our control for many years and we neglected it,” Wood said. “We don’t do any better. I think we’ve learned our lesson, and we’re trying to do better now. So there’s a lot of lessons learned. There’s a lot of love for Fair Park right now. So I think we’re in a better place.”
The reason for Wood’s optimism comes from the proposal’s emphasis on a hybrid public-private model with the city operating alongside private partners and nonprofits, which he said “will hold each other accountable,” as opposed to previous unilateral management by private entities or the city.
Vana Hammond is one of two remaining members who were on the park board at the time of Fair Park First’s inception. The communications professional previously worked 12-hour shifts during the State Fair as a Dallas Police officer and said the venue has never lived “fully up to its potential” in her lifetime. She also said that she’s cautiously optimistic about the plan and thinks the city has reached a crucial point in Fair Park’s history.
“I do not think we have too many more bites out of the Fair Park apple before people are like, ‘Ah, we’ve heard about Fair Park for 10 years. Nothing’s changed,’” Hammond said.
Walled Off
Resident Norma Shaw walks the fairgrounds almost daily. She’s originally from Chicago and, despite what she called a “stigma for South Dallas,” bought a house in the neighborhood after first landing in Cedar Hill.
While she said she knows now that the grounds are open to the public daily, she didn’t when she first arrived in 2013 — a misapprehension many Dallas natives operate under.
“It’s blocked off. Just walking up, you can’t see what’s going on,” Shaw said. “That’s been my experience with Texas, is that if you don’t know where to go. You may not see that you’re standing right in front of the building where all the people are inside.”
Between miles of parking lots, fences and a noticeable lack of pedestrian crossings on Fitzhugh Avenue, connecting Fair Park to the neighborhood isn’t easy. Neighborhood advocates have called for the fences to come down, and officials outlined a need to integrate Fair Park in South Dallas as one of the reasons for privatization in 2019.
Shaw said that while she’d like to see barriers come down, the real issue is marketing.
“The visibility is the problem. It’s not the fence, it’s the visibility,” Shaw said.
Since taking over, park department staff have outlined five pillars for success at Fair Park. The first focuses on fostering cooperation between campus partners, such as the African American Museum and Texas Discovery Gardens, through shared programming to increase visits. The second draws on community events like weekend farmers markets to create a draw for residents.
“Too many of our residents only experience Fair Park through the State Fair, or through Dos Equis shows, or through Broadway Dallas, or going to one of the museums,” Ryan O’Connor, senior deputy parks director, said. “But we need people. We need and want people out there all the time.”
Opening Fair Park to South Dallas residents was also a leading reason for the plan to replace parking lots on the northeast side of the campus with a 10-acre community park. Plans for the park stalled for years before the Dallas City Council approved an agreement this spring to allow Fair Park First to raise the $40 million required to build it. With a groundbreaking expected by the end of 2026, the park will have a 44-tent vendor area, green space, fitness amenities, picnic areas and a community pavilion, according to plans presented to council.
Shaw said the park represents progress toward a better future for Fair Park, where she said, “I want to see openness.”
“I want to see people. If I go to the back area, because I’m usually open there by the Women’s Museum… and I walk all the way over to the other side, the park will be behind there. So over there, I would like to see more life and little kids. There are no kids over here. Where are the kids? You know that they exist. We have two full schools, but there’s no life over there.”
“I would like to see shops in or around the hotel, and then the park on the back. And I don’t know why we’re having the hotel in front, but it needs to be visible so people know it’s there.”
The Plan
Plans for Fair Park have been a dime a dozen since 1936. The Fair Park First debacle is fresh in the memories of many Dallasites, while public-led management has time and time again failed to cover the necessary operational and maintenance expenses.
O’Connor said he knows residents will be skeptical of the plans and may wonder what has changed at the official level. He said, with the failures of private and public models in mind, that a hybrid model utilizing private partners with city oversight presents the best path forward.
“It’s just so clear that this is the path that will yield results,” O’Connor said. “We’ve done it fully ourselves. We fully privatized. Both had their significant issues, but implementing this, this hybrid model of strategically partnering with, you know, companies that are really, really successful in certain areas, it’s just so clear that that’s the right way to do it.”
As outlined by staff, the city could contract with private partners to provide security, parking, janitorial service or event management. The city has already approved a nearly $2.5 million contract with Visit Dallas to provide event-booking and sales services for major events, a third pillar of the staff’s plan for the grounds.
The park department is also planning to contract a private partner to run day-to-day operations at the Cotton Bowl, the epicenter of Fair Park which hosted major artists like Bruce Springsteen and Ozzy Osbourne in the early 1980s. O’Connor said staff traveled to the Rose Bowl to study its operations, and that the proposal to include a non-profit in the stadium’s running is largely based on the model they saw working in Pasadena. In addition to football games, the Rose Bowl also hosts community markets and major concerts, something the Cotton Bowl could benefit from.
The Cotton Bowl recently received a $140 million renovation, funded by the 2% Dallas receives from hotel occupancy tax returns under the Brimer Bill, and the funds can also be used for a variety of projects around the grounds. Along with luxury suites, air conditioning and new concourses, which will allow the stadium to continue hosting Texas-OU through at least 2036, the renovations also brought sorely-needed upgrades to backstage facilities. O’Connor said the upgrades should help draw artists.
Jenkins, who has been with the department for 33 years and led it since 2020, said the Cotton Bowl is the first step in a plan to help create a self-sustaining revenue stream to fund Fair Park operations. Which is especially important, he said, considering Dallas’ growingly constrained city budget.
“Once we get the activation of the Cotton Bowl going,” Jenkins said. “That’s going to be another revenue stream to come in. So we can put the pieces in place right today, but I need that bigger revenue stream, so I can start tackling some of those other bigger things.”
Park Hospitality
Officials hope that revenue stream can come from the potential redevelopment of parking lots around the planned community park into a lodging and entertainment district. The district could include a hotel, retail and possibly even a sports venue. Under the proposal, surface lots would be replaced with structured parking facilities.
Based on conversations with industry leaders, Jenkins said there is “significant” interest in developing a portion of the campus into a mixed-use district. Staff will study the potential for redevelopment and begin requesting proposals from developers in the next few months.
He also said that, along with interest from the business community, city officials have rallied behind the plan more than what he’s seen in the past.
“It’s the first time I’ve seen this type of support from the political community,” he said. “I just haven’t seen this type of momentum before, where everybody’s trying to get behind Fair Park.”
According to a briefing delivered to the City Council Parks Trails and Environment Committee on April 4, the plan would create revenue for Fair Park through lease agreements that would “mostly or fully fund all park and facility maintenance and operations.” Jenkins said that a mechanism to ensure revenue stays in Fair Park and isn’t diverted to the general fund will be crucial, and that state legislators may need to get involved as they did with the Brimer Bill in 2022.
The plan calls for any new development to conform with the existing character of the park. Jenkins wants to see the district take on a Western feel and said it will need to have a symbiotic relationship with State Fair operations, which have been criticized for hamstringing opportunities for year-round activation in the past.
“It has to be something that also, when the State Fair comes around, it kind of complements the State Fair,” Jenkins said. “We’ve got the cattle back there anyway. It needs to be something that you want to come from all across the world to go have that experience in Fair Park, in this entertainment venue. That’s what we’re looking for.”
The director has an ambitious goal, which O’Connor said may be aggressive: to start development in 2027. He is close to retirement, and said creating a long-term plan that sets the fairgrounds up for success is “personal” to him.
“We’re gonna be looking back two years from today, because you’re gonna see everything in motion, and we are gonna be looking back saying it was the best decision we ever made,” he said. “And I do feel like the surrounding community is finally going to say, ‘That’s the pride’ because that’s still their neighborhood. Fair Park is still their front door, and they’re going to look back and say with pride that they have this in their neighborhood, and that’s what I need them to feel.”
Fair Skepticism
Ken Smith, 72, lives in the South Dallas home he grew up in. He’s also served on community boards, worked for the city of Dallas and currently leads the South Dallas Revitalization Coalition.
Smith agrees that Fair Park could be an “economic engine operating on all cylinders for the benefit of everybody,” but said he doesn’t have faith in the city’s ability to reverse its fortunes.
“You’re talking about a concept,” Smith said. “And I’m talking about the persons who oversaw the privatization that failed miserably in every aspect, are the same people resurrecting it.”
He was one of the lone dissenting voices in approving the Community Park agreement with Fair Park First as a member of a task force organized to oversee the agreement. The information provided to the task force was insufficient, he said, leaving him with many of the same questions he had before the nonprofit’s takeover.
“We don’t know clearly in the community what the role of Fair Park First is,” he said. “It’s the exact same issue as it was in 2018. We don’t know where they’re located.”
Along with allowing the nonprofit to oversee planning for the community park, language in the council resolution approving the agreement with the nonprofit also allows for “FPF to raise funding for the entire Fair Park.”
While O’Connor said nonprofits will have a role in the future of Fair Park, he added “that’s not to say they will be managing anything.” However, an operations model update delivered to the park board in October noted that “a non-profit or quasi-governmental operating model may organically develop over the next 3 to 5 years.”
“It really doesn’t matter what they’re trying out,” Smith said. “The city is trying to do a mea culpa and save face. You oversaw seven years of basically setting Fair Park back multiple years after the whole privatization divide. So we’re not even starting off in the same place. We’re starting off behind where we were seven years ago. How do you account for that?”
Smith said he has no confidence in the city’s ability to revitalize Fair Park due to turnover at the city council and fragmented departmental management. The only way forward, he said, is giving the community a stake in Fair Park.
“I think that’s up to the citizens and the community to put on its big boy pants and think like leaders, and we need to work on that,” he said.
The Time is Now
The community park will sit on land currently occupied by lots 10A and 10B lots inside Gate 11. Once, the land was home to about 300 houses comprising a sprawling residential neighborhood in a historically Black community.
Parking lots are a symbol of South Dallas’ complicated relationship with the fairgrounds. Even after Black residents were able to attend the State Fair outside of designated “negro days,” Fair Park has failed to be a catalyst for vibrancy in the area, where some residents see a story of broken promises behind once-locked gates. As previously reported by the Observer, between 1999 and 2014, property values in the whole city increased four times faster than values near Fair Park.
Adam Bazaldua represents the South Dallas area as a City Council member. The fairgrounds were part of the reason he decided to run in 2018, and he said the history isn’t lost on him.
“For people to tell us that we’re going to invest in certain parts of the city and it’s going to trick my constituents,” Bazaldua said. “That’s not how this works. My constituents have waited long enough — the investment needs to come to their community, and we need to have policy that is driving that conversation and actually paving a way for what that future can look like. I refuse to accept that we’re going to continue to wait.”
He campaigned strongly for progress on the community park, which residents have been waiting on for over a decade. At the council meeting where the agreement was approved, he said that there is “an unnecessary level of scrutiny when it comes to having a project like this being shovel-ready” in South Dallas.
Along with most of his fellow members of the Parks, Trails and the Environment Committee, Bazaldua supports the plan proposed by staff. He said he wants small businesses from his district to be involved in the development, and believes South Dallas must benefit from the next steps.
As proposed by staff, developers would have to provide reports on local hiring, workforce development and economic benefit in the community. Bazaldua said opening a hotel “is something that’s going to provide job opportunities here” and that he wants more livable wage jobs in his district.
If the plans to build a multi-use district come to fruition, the surrounding area is likely to see renewed investment and a rise in real estate values. Those prospects often raise alarms of gentrification, but Bazaldua said he thinks the area won’t lose its character.
“I don’t want South Dallas to be Bishop Arts 2.0, and I don’t want South Dallas to be Trinity Groves 2.0,” he said. “I believe that South Dallas can thrive and still have an identity of being South Dallas, one that is prideful for black Dallasites of many generations that feel like the growth that they see in their community is one that came for them.”
That growth is already occurring in South Dallas, and has been for years. In 2019, the Observer reported that home values in certain parts of the area had increased by 110% since 2014.
Bazaldua said he felt the need for change is urgent, given the growth, and added that “you miss every shot you don’t take.”
“This is the moment for South Dallas,” Bazaldua said. “I think that it is absolutely critical for many reasons. One is the momentum that’s been built. And I think that speaks to that skepticism, we have momentum behind us, and if we aren’t going to take advantage of the wind that’s in our sail, then we’ve missed a huge opportunity because it hasn’t been presented to us in this way ever in the past.”
‘It Needs To Be More‘
At 73-years-old, Delphine Ganious has seen just about everything south of I-30. She’s a third-generation South Dallas homeowner living in the house where she used to pick up her grandmother for shopping trips.
Ganious remembers avoiding the fairgrounds when she was in school because she thought the food had been deep-frozen from “maybe the year before or something.”
“As I grew older, I had a girlfriend that used to own a turkey stand at the Fair Park, and she told me all the requirements and how the food had to be fresh,” Ganious said. “So I still go sometimes just to walk around and eat.”
She said she’s heard proposal after proposal to the fairgrounds, but still doesn’t feel there’s enough of a draw to bring people in.
“They need stuff there that we can attend year-round,” she said. “And they’ve been talking about for many years, but nothing’s happening yet, as far as I know, and like I say, they need a marquee billboard or something to tell you what’s going on at the fairgrounds, because I have no idea.”
Ganious still prioritizes fresh food and said she wants to see more restaurants at Fair Park — namely a cafeteria— given South Dallas’ classification as a food desert. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, virtually all of the census tracts surrounding Fair Park are considered low-income and low-access, meaning that at least 500 people and/or 33 percent of the population live more than 1 mile from the nearest supermarket, supercenter or large grocery store.
Overall, she said, Fair Park should — and needs — to be a more vibrant part of South Dallas’ footprint.
“It needs to be more,” she said. “It needs to offer something for the community and the surrounding areas for people to enjoy year-round, every day.”
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