About
An independent guide to El Paso
Built by people who live at the bottom of the Franklins, for anyone who wants more than the first page of search results — whether you moved here last month or you were born at Providence.
El Paso gets written about badly. National coverage arrives for a news cycle and leaves. Travel sites recycle the same five attractions. Meanwhile the actual city — a 700,000-person border metro with a mountain range through the middle of it, the oldest continuously settled ground in Texas, and a food culture that exists nowhere else — goes mostly undescribed.
This site is the correction. It currently holds 43 places to eat and drink, 30 things to do and 18 recurring events, and every one of them is something we would put a friend onto: the Tex-Mex rooms that have been doing it since the twenties, the trailheads twenty minutes from downtown, the free museums, the annual traditions that actually organize the year, and the neighborhoods that explain why the city is shaped the way it is.
How this gets built
This is a living site, not a published guidebook. Listings get added and revised as we go, and The Dispatch carries the running commentary. The goal is a page that is right this week — not one that was right the month it launched.
The single most useful thing you can do is tell us when something is wrong or missing. Business owners especially: if your listing is out of date, or you should be on here and are not, email us.
The editorial rules
No invented ratings or reviews
There are no star counts on this site, because we are not aggregating other people’s opinions and pretending they are ours. A place is either on the list because we would send a friend there, or it is not on the list.
No printed hours or prices
Hours change, kitchens close early, places take a week off in August. A wrong hour sends someone on a 20-minute drive for nothing. We describe what a place is and tell you to confirm the details.
When we are not sure, we leave it out
If we cannot confirm an address, or whether a place is still open, it does not go up. Blank beats wrong.
Events by window, not by date
Annual events get listed by the window they usually fall in, with a link to the organizer for this year’s dates. We would rather point you at the source than be confidently out of date.
We are a guide, not a wire service
The Dispatch carries our own writing — seasonal reads, explainers, what changed around town. For breaking news we point you at the El Paso newsrooms doing that work.
Every claim has a source behind it
Dispatch posts list the newsrooms, organizers and official pages we used, and openings and closings link to whatever confirmed them. If we cannot point at a source, we do not print the claim.
Corrections get published
If we get something wrong, we fix it and say that we fixed it. Email us and it gets handled.