Approximately 25 miles northeast of Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, Richardson is known as the center of Telecom Corridor; it includes the headquarters and offices of more than 500 technology and communication companies, including Samsung, AT&T and Verizon. The first tech company to come was the aptly named Texas Instruments in the mid-1950s. The University of Texas-Dallas is also in Richardson. Such plentiful high-tech headquarters can mean a wealth of meeting facilities, which venues in Richardson deliver. Another welcome benefit for the planner is that Richardson venues may serve alcohol.
Top-tier hotels with meeting venues in Richardson include the 336-room Renaissance Dallas-Richardson, with 30,000 square feet of meeting space, and 342-room Hyatt Regency North Dallas/Richardson, with 15,000 square feet; also nearby is the 298-room Doubletree Hotel Dallas. Richardson Civic Center has 22,000 square feet of space, a ballroom for 400 persons, beautiful landscaped grounds and a Dallas Area Rapid Transit train stop.
There are copious arts and leisure venues in Richardson, doubling as events venues. The Charles W. Eisemann Center for the Performing Arts & Corporate Presentations has 40,398 square feet of meeting and event space, including the 1,563-seat Margaret & Al Hill Performance Hall, the 400-seat Bank of America Theatre and the 300-seat Bank of America Hall. The North Texas Automotive Museum, which displays antique, classic, collector, muscle, race and movie cars, has room for 1,500 persons and 70,000 square feet of museum space, with its largest banquet room measuring 15,000 square feet. Very elegant is the Richardson Woman's Club, where Founders Hall, amid country club-like grounds, hosts up to 250 persons, with guests able to spill out to a gazebo. Meanwhile, for planners who are always on the lookout for municipal golf courses that do as good a job as private ones, Sherrill Park has two 18-hole courses, a restaurant and the Tournament Pavilion measuring 2,300 square feet.
All those tech wizards get hungry, and feeding them are excellent proponents of the barbecue, steak and Tex-Mex genres. One of Sonny Bryan's nine Dallas and Fort Worth locations is here, with space for groups of up to 100 persons, while Spring Creek BBQ, part of a larger chain, has been pleasing guests for more than 30 years; its Richardson location has room for groups of up to 90. Other restaurants worth getting tables in are the Twisted Root Burger Co., which makes converts of people who thought they knew a good burger, and Zyka Indian Restaurant, the Richardson location being the only other Zyka apart from the first in Atlanta, GA. (A good number of Indian restaurants opened to cater to all the Indian and South Asian tech graduates who have flooded to Telecom Corridor.) A small, wonderful, one-off Japanese venue is Sushi Sake, where the Tatami Room can cater to small groups of 25 and fewer.
