The 10 Best Things to Do in Dallas (and Top Things to Avoid)

Yes, it’s a bit touristy, but so are most towers. But the Dallas skyline is one of the city’s most enduring attributes, thanks in no small part to the opening credits of the 1980s TV series Dallas. Reunion Tower itself is one of the skyline’s most enduring landmarks. Head up to the Observation Deck (ideally at sunset) for views of the city skyline, or make a reservation at the Michelin-listed Crown Block (which is completely separate from the Observation Deck) for dinner or their lavish Sunday Brunch. Reservations for the Observation Deck are timed entry, and the parking is about a ten-minute walk from the tower entrance.

Shopping is a sport in Dallas, and Northpark Center is thriving when many shopping malls are in decline. Northpark, however, is a mall like few others—it’s packed full of art, there’s a sunny interior courtyard, and the mall offers higher-end services like valet parking and security escorts to vehicles—a boon to high rollers shopping at the store’s luxury retailers like Louis Vuitton or Harry Winston. There are plenty of other retailers to appeal to budgets, large and small, but the mall is also not a bad place to catch a movie, linger in the food court, or visit the resident turtles and ducks that live in the fountain opposite Neiman Marcus.

This SMU-adjacent avenue has become a hot spot for bars, restaurants, and music venues. It’s a high street in a forested neighborhood, so it has a small-town vibe even though it’s quite close to downtown. See local live music or join a dance party at The Granada Theater, try a food truck and a cold brew from the Truck Yard beer garden, or take in a summer evening from the rooftop at Terilli’s. For daytime fun, parking isn’t too much of a problem, but in the evenings, it gets to be a hassle pretty quickly. If you’re headed down around dinnertime or later, it’s a good idea to get a cab or rideshare. If you’re going to a restaurant with valet, don’t expect to bar-hop after your meal, either—parking is at such a premium here that valet attendants often require vehicle return as soon as you leave the establishment.

Starting at the Dallas Museum of Art and running roughly seven blocks to Arts Plaza, the Dallas Arts District has a wealth of theatres and museums, including the Winspear Opera House, Meyerson Symphony Center, the Wyly Theatre (which supports a number of theatre companies, including Dallas Black Dance Theatre), Nasher Sculpture Center, and the Crow Museum of Asian Art. The Dallas Art Museum has a large collection of international art, including sections for art from Europe, the South Pacific, Latin America, and pieces by Texas and Native American artists; general admission to the permanent collection is free, but advance tickets are required. The Nasher Sculpture Center has a nominal admission fee, but the first Saturday of every month is free.

Straddling the US-75 freeway between Downtown and Uptown is Klyde Warren Park, mostly known for being a good place to get a nosh from a food truck and sit at one of the tree-shaded tables for a midday lunch or snack. But the park also has a lot of free programming, from story hours for children to free dance performances, silent discos, or wellness classes like tai chi. There’s even a scheduled Little Art Bus that patrons can hop on and make use of some free art supplies near the food trucks. The park is also the site of ticketed music festivals or light art installations—almost as an extension of the Dallas Arts District.

Texas is known for barbecue. Most of the Dallas barbecue joints are outposts of places way out in the country, but they serve up beef brisket, jalapeño pork sausage, and pork ribs in the style of the Lone Star state, meaning you’ll often walk right up to the smoker or a steam tray near it, place your order, watch it be sliced and weighed out, and served on a tray or wrapped up in paper. You’ll order sides like coleslaw, deviled eggs, beans, or macaroni and cheese, but condiments like pickles, onion, barbecue sauce (often made in-house), and slices of white bread are often complementary. A couple of Dallas area favorites include Lockhart Smokehouse, Ten50 BBQ, Slow Bone BBQ, and Pecan Lodge BBQ.

Want an old-fashioned movie theatre experience straight out of an old-fashioned movie? Look no further than the Inwood Theatre. Built in 1947 (the mural of the topless water nymphs cavorting on the ceiling is thought to be over a hundred years old), the theatre maintains modern art touches from that era. In the main theatre, however (there’s a smaller screening room upstairs), it’s all modern, with plush couches. Blankets, however, are a no-no, patrons attempting to bring them in will be turned away. The theatre shows new releases, and on the last Saturday of each month, there’s a midnight showing of Rocky Horror Picture Show with a live shadow cast.

Fashioned from an old railroad line from the historic Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad (M-K-T, later shortened to K-T or Katy), the Katy Trail is now a walking/running/biking path through the middle of Uptown Dallas, stretching from Southern Methodist University to the American Airlines Center. It’s not uncommon to see runners and dog walkers out on pleasant weather days, although most of them seem to end up congregating for beeritas and barbecue at Katy Trail Ice House or the strip of restaurants and bars on Knox Street. For visitors who aren’t staying downtown in Uptown, several of the trail entrances are convenient to DART Rail stops.

Dallas is something of a concrete jungle, with a maze of freeways, and they can get pretty congested on weekdays. In particular, avoid I-35, US-75, and the Dallas North Tollway in the early evening hours. Luckily, a good navigation app can work wonders, telling you which surface streets to stick to during peak periods. It’s also worth noting that Dallas drivers are loathe to let anybody merge in front of them (turn signals are taken as a sign of weakness), so you’ll want to prepare to drive a bit on the bold side. Reverse-flow traffic is also a good strategy—heading into Downtown Dallas in the evening is much easier than heading out toward the suburbs. Also, be sure to head out early whenever you’re traveling by car and need to find parking – some of the restaurants and strip malls in the city’s older neighborhoods have a laughably tiny amount of parking.

Traffic aside, Dallas is also not a particularly walkable city—it was largely built in the mid-20th Century, which means it was built for cars. Even if the map shows a location is close, sidewalks are inconsistent outside of Downtown and Uptown. When using DART Rail or buses, be sure to check the length of the walk required to or from the stations—particularly when the temperatures climb into the triple digits (which is where Dallas spends much of the summer months). Once you’re within a neighborhood, they can be more walkable (Oak Lawn, Oak Cliff, and Deep Ellum are particularly walkable), but for getting between them, a car or rideshare is your best bet if they’re not on the DART line (and that’s most of them).

I’ll concede The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza is a pretty interesting visit, but the whole notion of visiting the area where a president was shot does come across as rather ghoulish (there’s an X on the street marking the exact spot where President Kennedy’s car was the moment he was shot). It’s certainly a footnote in the city’s history, harkening back to that week in November 1963 when virtually the entire country was fixated on Dallas, earning it the rather unattractive moniker “City of Hate” (The Dallas Observer playfully riffs on this in their Food & Drink vertical, entitled City of Ate).

Situated right next to the Cedar Springs strip, this boutique hotel in a historic building has polished marble floors and the well-appointed Library Bar, where guests can sink into a plush armchair with a fancy cocktail and listen to live piano or jazz singers most evenings. The hotel has preserved most of the historic features of the vintage building, which has previously served as a retirement home and a house of ill-repute, giving a throwback feel to this charming hotel convenient to the restaurants and nightlife of Oak Lawn and Uptown.

Turtle Creek, a tony micro-neighborhood situated between Oak Lawn and Uptown, is the home of the sumptuous Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek. Housed in an actual 1920s mansion resplendent in art deco and Spanish revival themes with straight lines and polished woods and marbles, it’s easier to feel like a houseguest in the home of a wealthy friend than a hotel guest here.  Service is familiar but polished, and guests can luxuriate in the comfortable guest rooms or the stratospherically famous-with-locals Mansion Restaurant and Bar, where the people-watching is perhaps second only to the tree-shaded pool deck.

I like to say Dallas has two weeks of patio weather each year—one in the spring and one in the fall. Summers here can be searingly hot, and winters can be annoyingly cold, considering the city is at the same latitude as Los Angeles. The best times to visit are in the in-between, and they’re longer than a week. March, April, October, and November can be the months with the most pleasant weather.

Generally speaking, you need a car to navigate Dallas, particularly if you’ll be visiting multiple neighborhoods, but DART, the local bus and rail system, can be a convenient mode of transport to and from DFW Airport (Love Field is also on the line, but requires a shuttle bus connection to reach the terminals), and to the spots along the line, but the spots not on the line vastly outnumber those that are. The system is designed to connect the suburbs with Downtown Dallas, so if your plans are taking you elsewhere, try driving.