Nightlife in Springdale

Arkansas' premier center for performing arts and entertainment.

Time Out Sports Bar & Grill sates stomachs with a hearty menu of hunger-busting eats while barkeeps pour on-tap brews and 11 high-def TVs display exciting scenes from gridirons, diamonds, courts, and arenas. Visitors can get their gullets into game shape with a squad of deep-fried spicy pickles ($6.99) or Sex On A Plate, which loads a pile of chili cheese fries with sour cream and guacamole ($7.99). The kitchen's flagship chicken wings can arrive boneless ($7.99), bone-in ($9.99), or brandishing novelty caveman bone clubs. Mandibles test their munching mettle on customizable cheeseburgers, which can tower up to four patties high ($5.99 for one, plus $1.99 per additional patty) and sport a crowning spire of bacon ($0.50 extra), just like Notre Dame Cathedral.

With its sleek decor of black leather seats, graphic black prints on white walls, gilded mirrors, and a wall of wine illuminated by cobalt lighting, it’s easy to think The Cosmopolitan Bistro is a chic lounge in the city, not an intimate bistro in the Ozarks. That’s exactly the type of feeling founder Liezl Stevenson-Perme was going for when she opened eatery in April 2011, and it has been so successful that it counts music producer and singer Tony Orlando as one if its patrons.

But the decor isn’t the only appealing thing about The Cosmopolitan Bistro. Oversize white plates arrive at tables topped with artfully arranged entrees of upscale American cuisine, such as new york strip steaks, grilled salmon smothered in rosemary-butter-cream sauce, and seared ahi tuna. On certain nights of the week, the bistro comes to life with the sounds of live jazz music, DJ-spun tracks, or auto-tuned baby laughs.

Andy Williams designed his Moon River Theater to echo the beauty of the surrounding Ozark Mountains. The façade sits amid 16 acres of foliage, rock formations, and waterfalls to not only enhance live performances with a sense of natural discovery, but also to speak to conservation. In 1992, the state of Missouri recognized the venue's environmental efforts by granting it the Conservation Award for Developed Land Use. And that sense of conservation seeps into the theater's three lobbies as well. Koi swim through ponds, flora creeps toward the ceiling, art and performance pictures from Andy's private collection grace the walls, and wild rams hold head-butting matches in the restroom.

Linda and Steve Wood broke the ground on their first Australian-themed enterprise when they opened The Outback Steak and Oyster Bar in 1987. Over the years, the eatery garnered enough attention from Ozark visitors that it inspired the couple to open the Outback Outfitters clothing store in 1989. Nearly a decade later the Woods converted the store into the Outback Pub, adorning its walls with Australian articles and serving a menu of down home, exotic fare. Wild appetizers such as kookaburra-sauce-laden gator tail cause taste buds to don tiny safari caps before trekking through entrees of seasoned grouper or the tavern's specialty Shepparton chicken pot pie. Sips from more than 100 beers bring tides of malty and hoppy flavor, while live entertainment hosted every night gives the dinner crowd a soundtrack more pleasing than compliment-whispering earmuffs.

Waxy O'Shea's Irish Pub fortifies merrymakers with a menu filled with hearty, Irish–inspired provisions and flowing libations. Baskets of Waxy's beer-battered Atlantic cod and chips ($9.99) prime thirstpumps for pints of Boulevard ($3.65+), and the irish RLT, stacked with rashers of thick-cut bacon, towers over appetites ($8.99). Sip spoonfuls of bubbly beer-cheese soup ($2.99), and sample authentic edibles with a plate of corned-beef-and-cabbage boxtys, a traditional stuffed pancake drizzled with mustard-tarragon cream sauce ($11.99).