Knife Italian Steak has served its last dinner at The Ritz-Carlton Dallas, Las Colinas. John Tesar’s restaurant at the Irving resort closed on Oct. 6. That ended a run of about two and a half years and left Tesar with a single Knife in North Texas, the one in Plano.
The resort confirmed the closing in a statement. It called the change part of the property’s evolution after its $65 million transformation into a luxury resort, and it thanked Tesar for his partnership. It also said a new signature restaurant is in development for early 2027, created with an acclaimed chef the resort hasn’t named yet.
The closing is quiet, but it comes at the end of a busy stretch for one of the most recognizable chefs in Dallas.
Knife Italian opened on March 19, 2024, at 4150 N. MacArthur Blvd. It took over from LAW at the resort that had been the Four Seasons before Ritz-Carlton took it over. The idea was a little surprising coming from Tesar, who had built his reputation on dry-aged beef. The first menu was meant for sharing, with antipasti, crudo, pastas like a lobster agnolotti and mains such as pork Milanese and veal loin. The dining room had a moody design with tropical touches that fit the resort.
Even then, the steaks stood out. They were wet-aged or dry-aged anywhere from 45 to 240 days, and in the end the beef won out. In September 2025 the restaurant rebranded as Knife Italian Steak and put the steak program front and center. It was a reasonable move for a chef whose dry-aged program had become his calling card.
That program has a long history here. Tesar trained at La Varenne in Paris and cooked in New York and Las Vegas before coming to Dallas in the mid-2000s to run the kitchen at The Mansion on Turtle Creek. In November 2012 he opened Spoon Bar & Kitchen, a seafood restaurant in Preston Center that made several national best-new-restaurant lists. Then in May 2014 he opened Knife on the ground floor of The Highland Dallas across from Mockingbird Station, and that’s where the reputation took hold.
Knife changed what a Dallas steakhouse could be. Tesar went to ranchers directly, especially 44 Farms, and built an aging room on site where beef rested for months. The best known cut was a 240-day dry-aged bone-in ribeye. Knife sold steak by the inch, added unusual cuts most diners had never seen on a menu and gave the burger as much attention as the beef. The burger, the Ozersky, was named for the late food writer Josh Ozersky.
Tesar competed on Top Chef twice and was named a James Beard semifinalist more than once. In 2020 he took the Knife idea to Florida, opening Knife & Spoon at The Ritz-Carlton Orlando, Grande Lakes. That restaurant earned a Michelin star in 2022 and kept it in 2023. Tesar is still a partner at the Orlando resort, where he also runs Knife Burger.
The last couple of years at home have been harder. In the fall of 2024, Tesar and The Highland announced a renovation that would turn the original Knife into Knife Steak & Seafood, a more approachable version of the Orlando restaurant. That plan never happened. By the next spring, the hotel and Tesar had agreed to part ways, and the restaurant that made his name in Dallas closed at the end of August 2025 after more than a decade.
Now Las Colinas has closed too, which makes Plano the place to go. Knife Plano opened at The Shops at Willow Bend in partnership with restaurateur George Stergios, and it is still open at 6121 W. Park Blvd. The mall itself closed at the end of August to make way for the planned Dallas Stars arena. The restaurant district is being kept, though, and Knife and its neighbor Mexican Bar Co. are both staying, with leases that run through 2038.
There’s also a bigger Dallas plan. When the Highland location closed, Tesar’s team said it had found a premier Dallas address for an expanded Knife, developed with GBOD Hospitality Group and 3ntourage Hospitality Group. That plan calls for three concepts under one roof: the steakhouse, a smaller and more intimate room called Pocket Knife, and a social concept called Switchblade. No address or opening date has been announced.
For now, the 240-day ribeye has one home in North Texas, and that’s Plano. The Ritz-Carlton will reveal its next chef sometime before the new restaurant opens in 2027. Tesar hasn’t said what comes next, and anyone who has eaten at Knife over the past 12 years will want to know when he does.
