Willow Bend closed for good on August 31. Nearly every store handed over its keys that day, and most of what’s left inside is headed for the wrecking ball to clear space for a $3 billion redevelopment that could someday include a Dallas Stars arena. Two restaurants stayed behind anyway. Knife Steakhouse and Mexican Bar Company are still open, still serving dinner, inside a mall that’s on its way to being demolished around them.
Neither one is there by accident, and neither one is leaving early. George Stergios, who runs Knife Plano alongside chef John Tesar, and Brian Dunne, who owns Mexican Bar Company, each signed twenty-year leases back in 2018. Those run through 2038, and no amount of construction dust changes that math. “With what’s coming you just have to hold on and work and make it through all of this,” Stergios said as the rest of the mall packed up and left. Dunne’s version was shorter. When he goes into business, he expects to succeed. He’s not going anywhere until the lease tells him to.
Knife opened here in late 2018, so the restaurant has never actually known a Willow Bend that wasn’t already in trouble. The mall pulled a quarter million people through its doors on opening weekend back in 2001 and spent most of the two decades since losing ground, first to the dot-com bust, then to Legacy West and Stonebriar picking off its shoppers one by one. Stergios has joked before that he and his crew deserve a medal just for staying open while Legacy West rose up the road and pulled half the county’s dinner reservations with it. These days Legacy West isn’t even the main threat. The building itself is.
The other anchors are mostly gone or on their way out. Macy’s closed back in March 2025. Neiman Marcus is set to close in January 2027. Crate and Barrel is sticking around through the end of December. Once those doors shut for good, Knife and Mexican Bar Company will be running two full kitchens inside what’s basically an empty shell, cooking dinner every night while crews work out what gets built around them.
What gets built, eventually, is something called The Bend: apartments, a hotel, office space, retail, and, if a few years of rumors turn out to be true, a new home for the Stars. None of it is expected to be finished before 2030. Stergios and Dunne are both betting that staying open through the mess, as strange as that looks with demolition crews circling, beats walking away from twelve years still left on the lease.
It’s a strange kind of commitment for two restaurants that didn’t sign up to be the last ones standing. Dunne has said plenty of operators in his position would’ve cut and run, and that he and Stergios stayed because they believe in what the developer is actually trying to do here. Whether that bet holds up is a question that won’t get answered for years. In the meantime, if you want a steak dry-aged the way Tesar’s kitchens do it, or Mexican food with the French edge Dunne built his menu around, the door’s still open, even while everything else around it closes for the last time.
Knife Steakhouse and Mexican Bar Company are both open daily at The Shops at Willow Bend, 6121 W. Park Blvd., Plano. Call ahead. Construction traffic around the property is only going to get heavier from here.
