We recently spent a weekend in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area. Our daughter was attending a gymnastics camp on the campus of Texas Woman's University in Denton, otherwise I'm not sure if we would have purposely made Denton a stop. But I'm glad that her gymnastics training brought us here.....in fact, her gymnastics takes us to lots of cool places.
One of our stops was Jupiter House Coffee. This is a funky coffee shop serving great drinks, homemade breads/pastries, sandwiches and sweets (like their homemade cinnamon rolls). Our drinks were delicious as was our bagel. Jupiter House also sells freeze dried candy, something we have been wanting to try. If you are in the area, we highly recommend!
You can't visit Denton without admiring the beautiful courthouse. The "Courthouse on the Square" was built in 1896 and was restored in 2004. It no longer serves as Denton's courthouse but does house a few county offices and the "Courthouse on the Square Museum" which is free to visit. You get the feeling that this square is the heart and soul of the community.
Wandering around the square took us to some fun and funky shops such as Atomic Candy, Norman Roscoe, Discover Denton, La Di Da, and Recycled. We could have spent a lifetime in Recycled thumbing through records, cds, and books. Billed as the largest independent book store in Texas, it has over half a million books alone. This 3 story building is a book lover's paradise.
Once we worked up an appetite, we settled on Barley and Board as it was across the street from Recycled. With so many great restaurants in Denton, it is hard to choose, but I am so glad this is where we landed. The restaurant is beautiful and is much larger than we expected. The bar seems to divide the restaurant in half and had we not walked to the restroom to wash our hands we would have not realized the size of the place.
We started our meal with a beer flight and the warm, sweet and spicy nuts.
The nuts had the perfect balance of sweet and spicy and was loaded with pecans, walnuts, cashews, and almonds rather than being mostly peanuts.
For our entree we decided to share the Wagyu Pastrami Melt. Since we ordered it to share, it was brought out separately plated. It's a damn good thing that we don't have this sandwich in our home city, otherwise it would become a weekly staple. This sandwich had the perfect balance of caramelized onions and cheese. The wagyu pastrami was melt in the mouth delicious. Honestly, this is one of the best sandwiches we've had in a really long time.
The sandwich was paired with house made chips......and pickles. We are huge pickle lovers. This sandwich comes with dill pickles but we asked if we could also get their bread and butter pickles. Both types were equally as good.
If in Denton, you must add the Wagyu Pastrami Melt from Barley and Board to your "must do" list. Seriously, this is a great sandwich. Also worth mentioning, we had top-notch service.
Ft. Worth is only a 40 minute drive from Dallas. Here we set out to do the top tourist attraction-- the Ft. Worth Stockyards and watch the famous cattle drive. The cattle drive takes place twice daily (11:30 am and 4:00 pm). This cattle drive is free and you will watch from the sidewalk/ curb as the longhorn make their way down Exchange Street.
There is also shopping (need cowboy boots or a cowgirl hat?) and restaurants at the Stockyards. You can also see the longhorn up close and personal (for free), go on a walking tour, take part in a maze ($8), ride a stagecoach ($15), visit the museum ($2), pet animals at the petting zoo ($5) and more.
Want to get up close and personal with a longhorn? For $5 you can sit right on top.
There is so much history at the stockyards but, know, that it is very much commercialized now. Still very pleased with this visit and we think it was well worth our time.
With a little bit of time left in Ft. Worth, we made a stop at the Fort Worth Water Gardens. This is a really remarkable "park" with unique water features. I've never seen anything quite like it. One of the features includes "stepping stones" down into a a deep section that is surrounded by cascading water. I went down so I could also get that perspective but we mainly hung out for some time at the top watching others. At one point there were several kids running down and around these stepping stones and I predicted that they were either going to fall in or knock someone else in. Luckily, this didn't happen as it could have resulted in someone getting hurt.
Next we stopped at Morgan's Ice Cream because it was H O T. The ice cream was good but the fact they don't give samples was a little off-putting. We then walked over to Summer Moon Coffee for a refresher. We didn't realize this was a coffee chain as we often like to support local establishments, but, nonetheless it was a nice visit.
We enjoyed our short visits in both Denton and Ft. Worth. The campus of TWU was beautiful. We even made time for a great nap using the hammocks at the turtle pond.
The Travel Gritty: 3 words- Wagyu Pastrami Melt (You can thank us later.)
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