Start from 63 curated places around Fort Worth, TX, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
Panther City BBQ
Central Texas-style barbecue cooked on offset pits in a small Southside space that began as a food truck, now a Texas Monthly Top 50 and Michelin-listed spot. The brisket elote — chopped brisket over street corn — is the dish that defines the menu, alongside deeply smoked brisket with a classic peppery bark and an unusually good mac and cheese.
Goldee's Barbecue
Open only Friday through Sunday in a south Fort Worth parking lot, Goldee's shot to the top of Texas Monthly's list by combining Central Texas brisket obsession with Lao sausage and unexpected Asian-inflected sides — a direct reflection of the pitmaster team's heritage. The lines form early and the sellouts are real; a Michelin Bib Gourmand.
Trails & outdoors
Canyon Ridge Trail
The most challenging hike within Fort Worth city limits, running 3.25 miles through the Fort Worth Nature Center along limestone and sandstone outcroppings with steep inclines, 63 stone steps, and Civilian Conservation Corps rock structures from the 1930s. The payoff is multiple viewpoints over Lake Worth framed by low canyon walls and ridge-top hawks.
Trinity River Trail: Oakmont Park
A 5.7-mile paved out-and-back along the Clear Fork of the Trinity River from Oakmont Park, passing wooded riverbank, open prairie stretches, and neighborhood greenbelt edges on a wide multiuse path. The most accessible section of Fort Worth's 100-plus-mile Trinity Trails network, consistently popular for cyclists, runners, and dog walkers.
Things to do
Billy Bob's Texas
Three acres under one roof in the Stockyards make this the world's largest honky-tonk: a Texas-size dance floor, dozens of bar stations, a Wall of Fame with celebrity handprints, and — on Friday and Saturday nights — live professional bull riding in an indoor arena. It functions as both a tourist attraction and a genuine music venue with national country acts on its main stage.
Cowtown Coliseum
The site of the world's first indoor rodeo in 1908 still hosts the only year-round weekend rodeo in the world: the Stockyards Championship Rodeo on Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and the PBR Stockyards Showcase on Thursdays. Climate-controlled, two-plus hours of bull riding, barrel racing, and team roping at modest prices.
Landmarks & sights
Fort Worth Stockyards National Historic District
The 98-acre Victorian-era district where the cattle trade shaped Cowtown's identity still runs a twice-daily longhorn drive down Exchange Avenue — the world's only daily cattle drive. Brick-paved streets, a working rodeo arena, 1880s saloons, and the smell of livestock make it feel less like a theme park and more like an actual Texas cattle town that forgot to stop.
Sundance Square
Thirty-five blocks of restored red-brick streets at the heart of downtown, anchored by a European-style plaza with a permanent performance stage, a fountain, and Bass Performance Hall rising at the edge. It is genuinely walkable, lively on most evenings, and functions as Fort Worth's living room rather than a mall-style tourist district.