Fort Worth is famously the city where the West begins. It was the last “civilized” stop in the 19th century before settlers and colonizers headed West on cattle drives, in search of land to claim, or on their way to the California gold rush. For generations, even as it built up into a populous city and center of international industry, Fort Worth has held on to its Western persona, renovating the Thurber brick roads first paved in the late 1890s, preserving the Stockyard that once was one of the world’s largest livestock markets at the heart of Cowtown, and passing on the stories of the red light district in Hell’s Half Acre. There are (allegedly) haunted hotels galore and more steakhouses than you can shake a lariat at. However, the new shiny star in town is Taylor Sheridan’s TV productions.
Sheridan is the creator and showrunner for a universe of Western-themed nighttime soap operas that currently all run on Paramount’s networks and streamer. You’re likely most familiar with Yellowstone, from which spawned an entire cinematic universe revolving around the Dutton family of Montana, and their various dramas. In 2025, Sheridan signed a deal with NBC Universal that could end up being worth over a billion dollars, which will begin in 2029, for which he promised to create around 20 new shows.
While Sheridan wasn’t born in Fort Worth (that happened in North Carolina), he got to Texas as soon as he could, as the old saying goes. In high school, he acted in school plays and on the Stage West Theater. On weekends, he learned to be a cowboy at his grandparents' ranch in Cranfills Gap, a small town in Central Texas outside Waco, which his mother bought when he was eight. Sheridan has continued the split between country and city life, purchasing the sprawling 6666 Ranch in January 2022, which is about 200 miles outside Fort Worth in the little town of Guthrie, Texas, and the Bosque Ranch in Weatherford in 2020, which is about 30 miles away, making him the ninth-largest landowner in Texas. He opened the largest film studio in Texas in Fort Worth. Since then, he’s spent more and more time shooting shows in Fort Worth — Lioness, Landman, The Madison, Dutton Ranch, and 1883 have all used the city and its restaurants as a backdrop.
In 2022, Sheridan became a co-owner of Cattlemen’s Steakhouse, a spot that has been a staple in the Stockyards since 1947, and a total tourist trap since at least the 1970s, when the Stockyards National Historic District began courting more tourism. His team completed a multi-million dollar renovation of the place in summer 2025, which refreshed the original building, added an outdoor patio, and built a stage for live music that increased its footprint by 20,723 square feet. It also opened a private members-only club that holds 130. Beef for the steakhouse is provided by Sheridan’s 6666 Ranch. As of now, Sheridan’s ranch sells beef to his restaurants — Cattleman’s and the Four Sixes Ranch Steakhouse pop-up in the Wynn Las Vegas — along with providing it to Hurtado Barbecue, which has locations in Arlington and Dallas, and directly to consumers.
There’s a recurring spot in Landman called the Patch Cafe, where Thornton’s character frequently goes for meetings or just to have a drink and dinner. It’s a classic all-day cafe that looks a little run down, and where Blake Lively's sister, Robyn, plays a waitress. It’s not a real restaurant, but there is talk about opening a real one. There’s an urban cowboy vibe that fans of Sheridan’s shows might get from watching. It’s real, but it most accurately reflects the circles he runs in — the captains of industry and upper echelons. With all his money and influence, he’s showcasing the parts of Fort Worth’s restaurant scene that fit into his TV universe.
Not only is Fort Worth the only major city in Texas that is still red, but some of Sheridan’s shows, especially Landman and The Madison, have been known to put strong anti-liberal political diatribes into the mouths of characters. The juggernaut that started it all, Yellowstone, is an escapist western fantasy in which a family dynasty battles to keep the ranch that has been in their family for generations, and was inspired by his mother’s struggle to save the family ranch after his parents divorced to do exactly that.
A viral speech from Billy Bob Thornton’s character Tommy on season 1 of Landman, in which he asserts that wind turbines are just as bad as the oil industry, was so grossly anti-sustainable energy that the lobbying firm the American Petroleum Institute launched a national campaign in support of the show. In response, Climate Town made its own video debunking disinformation in the monologue, and the Advance Power Alliance and Newsweek fact checked it and found it lacking.
As for The Madison, which shot some Manhattan restaurant scenes in Fort Worth’s Emilia’s, Clay Pigeon, and the Wicked Butcher, and which is still airing its first season now, Sheridan has a woman character get punched in the face and mugged on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Michelle Pfeiffer plays a family matriarch who calls herself a city mouse, but is somehow ready to leave it all after one visit to her husband’s land in Montana.
Part of Sheridan’s mission to build his own private Hollywood in Fort Worth has included red carpet premieres for his shows at the Hotel Drover in the Stockyards, and more than a few A-list stars eating dinner at the city’s fine dining institutions. Yes, there is fine dining in Fort Worth, thanks in part to affluent suburbs between Dallas and Cowtown like Southlake and Westlake, an influx of wealth to Weatherford, and to the population boom in Fort Worth, which surpassed Austin to become the fourth-largest city in Texas in 2025. Weatherford, which is west of Fort Worth, is known as the Cutting Horse Capital of the World, where at over 70 farms in the area, the horses used to shepherd cattle are raised and sold for as much as $60,000 each. Fort Worth itself is also booming, with Texas Christian University’s student body being a major factor. It has an over 50% out-of-state student body, leaning heavily Californian, that brings a lot of parents to town and lures a lot of students to stay after they graduate. It has long had a reputation as a conservative campus. The Texas Tribune reports the city has added 95,000 jobs in the last three years. Ben E. Keith, one of the country’s largest food distributors, also calls Fort Worth home. It’s the headquarters for American Airlines, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, and Bell Flight — this is an aerospace and defense industry town.
This money, combined with the celebrity and media attention Sheridan is bringing, means changing clientele for the city’s restaurants. When I visited 61 Osteria around the holidays in 2025, owner Dain “Adam” Jones greeted me at the door, as he has every time I’ve visited. Jones is an old-school hospitality guy who has been in the industry for 50 years. “My longest [relationship with a] celebrity revisit is probably Harrison Ford,” Jones says in a phone interview in May. “He’s eaten with me since the mid-90s, almost every year, which is a huge compliment.” Jones hasn’t seen him in the past few years, noting that Ford was a frequent visitor to North Texas for pilot training and testing, but that has probably slowed down since he’s in his 80s. Ford also stars in Sheridan’s Yellowstone prequel, 1923, largely shot in Montana and central Texas.
Sheridan is a longtime customer, Jones says. Lioness and Landman have shot scenes in 61 Osteria. The former dressed it as a restaurant in Washington, D.C., while the latter let it be Fort Worth and gave it quite a lift in profile. “It turned out to be just unbelievable,” Jones says. “Not only did the restaurant go crazy, but my wife’s [Joey Lancaster] art was filmed throughout, and she blew up on her Instagram because of all the pictures with her lovely art in it.” Reservations and follower counts jumped, and soon a typical night at 61 Osteria featured a mix of proud locals and tourists tracking the locations used in the show.
Different versions of this same story come from many restaurateurs and chefs in town. Sheridan features a restaurant, and voila, a boom in customers. At Chumley House, the first Fort Worth outpost from the wildly successful Duro Hospitality in Dallas, co-owner Chas Martin says the restaurant being called out by name in an episode of Landman was a surprise. “They’ve been mentioning prominent families, restaurants, museums,” he says. “We did not know that was going to be the case until we saw the show.” Martin took his chance to let the show know any of its Dallas locations were available as sets (and its Michelin-award winning Dallas spot, Mister Charles, also makes an appearance and gets named in season 2), and was told that production is hyper-focused on Fort Worth. “It’s amazing for that town, which is having a golden-era of sorts — not just because of that, but that is one of the components of it.”
And then there’s Preston Paine, the chef at Emilia’s and the Blue Room inside the Crescent Hotel Fort Worth, which is owned by one of the most well-known and wealthiest of Fort Worth people — billionaire John C. Goff. Paine, who is an alum of three Michelin-starred Eleven Madison Park in New York City, notes that Sheridan has dined with him multiple times and is friends with the Goffs. “In Landman, Jon Hamm’s character is married to Demi Moore, who is named Cami after Cami Goff,” Paine says. “And their residence in the show is John and Cami’s home in Fort Worth; that’s not a set.”
Turning Fort Worth into Sheridan’s filming mecca comes with a lot of celebrities who want to eat out. Jones mentions seating Michelle Pfeiffer and her showrunner husband, David E. Kelly, while she was in town shooting The Madison. Samuel L. Jackson and Andy Garcia also stopped by while shooting different Sheridan shows. At Chumley House, the staff has seen the likes of Sheridan stars Morgan Freeman, Zoe Saldana, and Billy Bob Thornton. All of this amounts to a boost in tourism, for locals and visitors alike, who want to see the celebrities newly filming a plethora of shows in North Texas, or to just experience the locations from the shows. Local media run stories about where they eat and shop, track where the shows shoot, and almost everyone gossips about which celebs they’ve seen — including the staff and owners of any place the Sheridan extended universe touches.
The only complaint I’ve heard is about the traffic jams Sheridan’s shows sometimes cause while filming, but even all of that is off the record until I spot a stray Instagram story posted by Travis Heim, founder of Heim Barbecue and the newly opened One Trick Pony Pizza Tavern, cracking a joke. “Be on the lookout for Taylor Sheridan’s new show, ‘Inconveniencing Travis everywhere he goes in Fort Worth,’ on Paramount+,” he wrote with a photo of some stopped cars in front of a closed road. “It’s funny, I guess they’re filming [Sheridan’s newest show] Frisco King in our neighborhood,” Heim tells Ravenous. “When I got home, I couldn’t pull into the driveway because they were filming something. What’s going on? This guy has so many shows,” he finishes with a dry laugh.
Heim hasn’t met Sheridan, and says a lot of Fort Worth locals like himself have felt kind of hesitant about the takeover of his town. “I see it as a positive overall,” Heim says. “I grew up going to Cattleman’s and [the redesign] is great.” Heim has even seen the private members' club downstairs and gives it his seal of approval. “It’s nice but still fits in at the Stockyards without being gimmicky. I’m all for it.” But some locals are feeling and mourning the loss of the city’s small-town feel. That comes from tourism, the push for which goes way beyond Sheridan’s influence, and includes bringing Michelin to the city in 2024 and an ongoing push for music and Western tourism that revolves around the Stockyards. This is compounded by cost of living increases. While Fort Worth is still well below the national average, the cost of living there has increased by around 20 percent in the last five years. It’s not the uberwealthy that feel that pinch, it’s locals.
Outside of the tourists and those wealthy enough to be on the fine dining circuit, Sheridan’s productions have made an impact on the more artistic side of Fort Worth. Owner Eric Vickers says his dive bar, the Down ‘N Out, has become a favorite for the crew of Landman, who are mostly made up of folks from Austin and Lockhart. Austin and Fort Worth are, on the face of it, pretty far apart both experientially and ideologically — although Austin has been slowly changing from the “keep it weird” city of the ‘70s into a more tech-centric place over the last 20 years. It’s no small thing for Austinites to find a place, a part of town, where they feel comfortable in Fort Worth. The Down ‘N Out opened in 2024, but it’s outfitted with retro touches like VHS tapes stacked by the two old TVs, Tiffany-style lamps with Budweiser logos hanging over the pool tables, and oversized and overstuffed booths that look like they were refurbished from someone’s basement.
“I think they were attracted to the neighborhood, the Near Southside, overall,” Vickers says. “It’s the more artistic, eclectic neighborhood… A lot of the headlines are about Bowie House and the Crescent, but these people are looking for a dive bar to shoot some pool and drink some beer after they get off work.” Some of the talent have slipped by too, but the people behind the show aren’t going to the private clubs. They can be found in small spots like Hatsuyuki Handroll Bar, JD’s Hamburgers (across the street from the fake front of the Patch Cafe), and the century-old Joe T. Garcia's, where the lines are long, and the Tex-Mex is just awful, but the margaritas are strong, and the patio is unmatched. “For the most part, the crew and staff who are the back of the house production side have been the easiest going, nicest, and super appreciative of the city and the places they go,” says Vickers. They, by observational accounts, are falling in love with the Fort Worth that exists outside of the glow of Sheridan’s TV cameras.
The question of why Sheridan seems intent on putting his stamp on Fort Worth remains opaque; his publicist did not respond to an email requesting an interview or any statements from him or his co-owners in Cattleman’s Steakhouse and his film studio. However, centering shooting on his 6666 Ranch has netted Sheridan a tidy profit. The Wall Street Journal reports he charges Paramount $50,000 a week for the privilege of shooting there. That is in addition to his salaries for writing, producing, directing, and occasionally starring in his shows, and the costs of training, rehearsals, and miscellaneous prep like horse wrangling. Sheridan’s universe of shows is allegedly the most expensive to produce in the industry (as well as the most profitable), and the WSJ characterized the level of control he has over making these decisions as “unusual.” Season 2 of Landman finds a crew of characters congregating at his newly-opened private club in Cattleman’s Steakhouse, and citing the destination by name — something the show hadn’t previously done with any locations, though it began to after. There is money in the location fee, but even more money in getting fans of the show to Cattleman’s and selling more of the $4,000 membership fees to join.
There is still money to claim where the West begins. Sheridan’s success, with shows like Yellowstone garnering an audience of 10 million per episode, has made him a billionaire. They’re just not like the rest of us, to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald. Studies have found that billionaires experience more happiness thinking about themselves than others, and are more likely to be narcissistic and feel entitled to power. And with the wealth gap at its highest since the French Revolution, it’s clear that amassing wealth is causing a societal breakdown in the U.S., with the oligarchical billionaire class buying influence in politics under the corrupt Trump regime. Sheridan hasn’t overtly involved himself in any of that. Instead, he’s focused on building up Fort Worth and turning the city into a hub for his studio. By doing so, he has created the conditions to join the upper echelon of the city’s monied and influential class. No one who owns or works in a restaurant has a bad thing to say about him, seemingly because most of what he’s done has been great for Fort Worth, but also because they cannot afford to alienate him.
An armchair psychologist might muse that Sheridan’s choosing to focus all this attention on Fort Worth is his own escapist fantasy from Hollywood, to a place that either encompasses the small-town-in-a-big-city feel he remembers from childhood, or that embodies the conservative political values he holds and wants to unmask. Sheridan told the Hollywood Reporter, “It was a great escape from the fact I was a failing actor living in West Hollywood. The plan was always to become a big movie star, then move back to a ranch and just do movies with Martin Scorsese when I felt like it.” His politics are still somewhat opaque, but there clearly is a childlike view of masculinity (and femininity) at play, wrapped up in the magic of the Old West and some vision of a childhood home.
It’s creating an image of Fort Worth as a sophisticated oil-business town where folks wear cowboy hats that’s not dissimilar to what Dallas did for its sister city over 40 years ago. What Sheridan hasn’t done yet, and I hope he does, is show the other side of Fort Worth. I want to see the Fort Worth that’s the premier arts city in Texas, where people like Leon Bridges and Abraham Alexander are singing stars hanging at the Down ‘N Out on a Saturday night, or grabbing a burger at Kincad’s any day of the week. And where women are eccentric billionaires too, and not relegated to being arm candy in tight dresses. Fort Worth has the only Michelin-recognized birria in the Metroplex, and multiple James Beard and Michelin-noted barbecue spots. I’d like to see them get the screen time fine dining restaurants get as window dressing for fraught business meetings.
