Beyond Disneyland, Here’s What to Do in Anaheim

Most visitors experience Anaheim as a simple shuttle route. The drive down from LAX, a hotel near the park, the gate, and back again.

That’s a fine way to spend a vacation. It also means missing almost all of the city. The Disneyland Resort covers roughly 500 acres. Anaheim covers about 50 square miles, and the parts worth seeing sit two or three miles from the turnstiles. Here’s what’s really out there.

A 1919 Orange Packing House, Now Full of Restaurants

Ask where locals eat, and the answer is the Anaheim Packing District, close enough that leaving the resort for dinner costs you fifteen minutes.

Four landmarks make it up, each with its own history:

• The Packing House, the centerpiece, a 1919 Sunkist citrus facility with two airy floors and more than 30 vendors.
• The MAKE Building, a former 1917 marmalade factory now holding food and drink businesses along with community events.
• The Packard Building, a restored 1925 car showroom with a restaurant and bar inside.
• Farmers Park, the open space between them, hosting community events and occasional markets.

A few that stand out:

• The Kroft, where poutine arrives under fried chicken, bacon, and cheese curds.
• Georgia’s Restaurant for buttermilk fried chicken done properly.
• Unsung Brewing for something local on tap, over in the MAKE Building.

Harder to find is The Blind Rabbit, a speakeasy behind a wall of sake barrels. Thirty seats, and reservations are required rather than recommended.

There’s usually live music or an event on somewhere, so dinner tends to turn into a drink afterward.

Little Arabia, on Brookhurst Street

A few minutes west of the resort sits one of the most significant Arab American commercial districts in the country, and the average visitor has no idea it exists: The Little Arabia District.

Brookhurst Street runs through the middle. Along it:

• Bakeries and grocers stocking things you won’t find elsewhere in the county.
• Halal butchers and hookah lounges.
• Restaurants covering Lebanese, Syrian, Palestinian, Egyptian, and Yemeni cooking.

The community assembled this over four decades, and official recognition from the city arrived only in 2022. What that means in practice is depth. Not one good Lebanese restaurant, but a street where you can eat Lebanese on Monday, Yemeni on Tuesday, and Egyptian on Wednesday, all within a few blocks.

This is the single best place to eat in Anaheim, and it isn’t close. Go hungry, go with a group, and order more than seems sensible.

An Arena, a Ballpark, a Concert Venue, and a District Under Construction

The Platinum Triangle houses three venues within a short distance of one another:

• Honda Center, home to the Ducks and a concert venue through most of the year.
• Angel Stadium, where baseball runs spring into fall and a summer evening game remains one of the better nights out in Orange County, especially when convenient transportation is part of the plan.
• Grove of Anaheim, covering smaller shows, comedy, and touring acts that don’t need an arena.

A note on OCVIBE, because guides have started listing it as an attraction. It’s a $5 billion, 100-acre entertainment district rising around Honda Center, and it will change this part of Anaheim considerably. It’s also still under construction, opening in phases rather than all at once, with the new concert hall scheduled for early 2027. Honda Center operates throughout, but most of what people are excited about isn’t there yet.

The Canyon Nobody Mentions

East of the city, the streets end, and the hills start. Oak Canyon Nature Center sits up there at 6700 East Walnut Canyon Road. Fifty-eight acres across three adjoining canyons, with four miles of trails, deep shade, and a running stream. The paths pass through one of the region’s few remaining areas of oak woodland and coastal sage scrub.

Monarch butterflies pass through on migration, eastern fox squirrels are everywhere, and bobcats live in the canyons. Sightings vary by season and time of day. The John J. Collier Interpretive Center covers local natural history and keeps limited hours, so check the City of Anaheim’s current listing rather than assuming.

Further east, Yorba Regional Park has four lakes, permitted fishing, and bike and paddle boat rentals. It connects to the Santa Ana River Trail, which runs all the way to the Pacific if you have the legs for it.

Rainy Days and Odd Hours

Two more for when the weather or the clock doesn’t cooperate.

Downtown, Muzeo runs rotating exhibitions with a wide range, from Downton Abbey costumes to Tutankhamun artifacts. Small, indoors, and turning over enough to reward a second visit.

At Flightdeck + Rogue Racing, you fly a Boeing 737 or a fighter jet simulator with an instructor beside you. It’s aimed at aviation enthusiasts, and it works well on teenagers who have run out of patience with lines.

Getting Between Them

Distance is the main reason visitors miss all of this. Here are the rough distances from the park gates:

• Packing District, about two miles.
• Little Arabia, roughly three miles.
• Oak Canyon, fifteen minutes east.

One thing changed the whole calculation here, and most guides have not caught up. Anaheim Resort Transportation operated for nearly 30 years, carrying more than 8 million riders annually across roughly 19 routes, connecting over 80 hotels to the parks, the Convention Center, Honda Center, Angel Stadium, and downtown.

It ended on March 31, 2026, and nothing has replaced it at that scale. Garden Grove runs a shuttle for a handful of its own hotels, and Disney still covers the Toy Story lot, but the Packing District, Brookhurst Street, and the Platinum Triangle lost their transit link entirely. That is why the distances above matter more than they used to. Two miles was a shuttle ride. It is now a decision.

The same applies to the way back. The run up to LAX takes about an hour, and what’s open varies sharply by terminal, which matters more on a late departure than most people expect.

Give It One Evening

You don’t need to restructure the vacation around any of this. One evening is enough.

Book a table at the Packing House on a night you’d otherwise have eaten at the hotel. Or drive to Brookhurst Street for lunch on the day nobody can face another line. Either one takes a couple of hours and changes what you think this city is.

Anaheim spent seventy years as a citrus town, and a good deal of it still has nothing to do with a mouse. Most visitors leave never having seen that version. You don’t have to be one of them.

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