15 September 21 - 27, 2023 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents A Hack Guide to the State Fair of Texas Hate the fair? Here’s how to love it. BY LAUREN DREWES DANIELS T here are people who live for the State Fair of Texas. Their LinkedIn bios and social me- dia profiles brag about being a fried food guru. Corn dogs and funnel cakes cover their Instagram walls on Opening Day. And for them, Opening Day doesn’t have anything to do with nine play- ers on a diamond. It’s the first day Big Tex welcomes visitors through the gates at the fairgrounds every fall. Families stroll along the Midway looking at all the lights and games. Kids sit on Dad’s shoulders for a better view of things. It’s an easy-going time that is clearly a decades- long tradition for many. These are Fair Peo- ple. Just like there are many Disney Adults, there are so many Fair People. This guide is not for those people. This guide is for people like me. I am not a Fair Person. My Family has not histori- cally been a Fair Family. Last year was the first time I’d been to the fair outside of a media event in a while. We decided to take public transportation to avoid traffic and save on parking but we didn’t calculate the times for the Trinity Railway Express cor- rectly and spent about two hours traveling 20 miles. After we arrived, we waited another half hour in line for coupons. We were generally lost and pushing three hours since leaving, with nothing to eat or drink, and I couldn’t help but hear myself telling the kids back at the house, “Don’t eat now we’re going to eat at the fair.” While walking along to try to find some particular fried food, we got caught in a quagmire that was like Lovers Lane and the Tollway at 5 p.m. but people instead of cars. No one was moving. Claustrophobia trig- gered, we inched our way through only to realize we needed to turn around. At this point, my teenage kids were like the twins in The Shining. Some of the lines were comically long. For us, anyway. We’re admittedly not great at lines. We at least need to be emotionally prepared, and we weren’t. In fact, we were drained. Thank God Fernie’s in the Embarcadero Building was only lightly packed and we were able to sit down and stuff funnel cakes in our faces while deciding whether we wanted to be a family anymore. We kept go- ing back through the line and ordering more and more funnel cakes. Of course, we underestimated how many coupons we needed, so we had to go through that line again, only to then leave with too many. As luck would have it, this turned out to be the single busiest day at the fair last year, according to news reports at the time. We didn’t ride any rides or see a concert, but we did see cute baby goats headbutt each other in the livestock area, which was an aggres- sive but on-point metaphor for the after- noon. Leaving was rinse and repeat. We made one leg of the trip back home — the kids saw something they shouldn’t have (thanks, DART) — so we gave up and took an Uber home from American Airlines Center, which cost more than it would have to just park at the fair. We were idiots and didn’t know how to do the fair. But not this year. We got learned. So, here we hope to impart some tips for a swift arrival and fortuitous time trying a variety of fried food without blowing your budget. This is a guide for people who haven’t yet figured out the angles as well as some pointers on what to eat: because there are just so many options. We have four main sections starting with what to eat broken out by classics, Big Tex Choice Awards, hidden gems and new arrivals. Then we’ll look at some financial tips for peak enjoyment. Observer Picks for Classic Fair Food The State Fair of Texas, as we know it, has largely been conceived and financed in vats of bubbling oil. Here are the classic foods every fairgoer should hit: Fletcher’s Original Corny Dogs There’s debate over who actually “in- vented” the corn dog but Fletcher’s defi- nitely made it popular. Founders Neil and Carl Fletcher started making corn dogs at their stand in 1942. Last season, fairgoers consumed 583,000 corny dogs in 24 days. That’s more than 24,000 a day. Fletcher’s has seven orange and yellow stands around the fairgrounds. State Fair of Texas | CITY OF ATE | t Dish Fair Thee Well S t a t e F a i r H a c k s f o r N o n - F a i r P e o p l e f r o m t h e D a l l a s O b s e r v e r s t a f f * State Fair of Texas Enjoy classic fair food on the Midway. >> p16
