Food
Mae's Meat Market
It is tucked off the main strip down a dirt road and you pretty much have to know it is there, but everybody has found it. Half the building is an old-school meat market and half is a cafe, so you can pick out a steak and have them cook it. Get the steak fingers, tenderized on the spot and Texas-sized.
La Finca
Every good small town has a hole-in-the-wall Mexican joint, and this is Cisco’s — sizzling fajitas and saucy enchiladas under flamenco prints and Aztec masks. The name means a small ranch, which is why you order the ranch-style fajitas, finished with cheese and a spicy picoso sauce. Start with brisket nachos.
Food
Red Gap Brewing
A craft brewery in an old downtown building in a town of 4,000 is a fine surprise on its own, and the name is a history lesson: Cisco was called Red Gap until a tornado wiped it out in 1878. That year is now the name of their lager. The rest of the board gets creative, so order a flight and work down it.
Culture
Eastland County Museum
The old bank building holds the story of this county, and it is wilder than a town of 3,600 has any right to be: the 1917 oilfield strike that helped fuel a world war, a saloon bar with a bullet hole through it, and Old Rip, the horned toad sealed into a courthouse cornerstone in 1897 and pulled out alive in 1928.
Culture
Conrad N. Hilton Center & Museum
Conrad Hilton came to Cisco to buy a bank. The deal fell through, and he found himself in the lobby of a very busy hotel thinking he should run hotels instead. This is the Mobley, built in 1916, and in 1919 it became the first Hilton property — forty rooms and a town full of oil workers with nowhere to sleep.
Outdoors
Old Zoo Nature Trails
In the 1920s, when Cisco was booming, townspeople built a zoo below the dam of the new lake. It was abandoned by the 1930s and swallowed by trees until the trails were cleared and it reopened as a nature park. You hike the old footpaths past cages marked by crumbling stone and rusted iron.
