Knife Italian

Italian cooking in Dallas is notoriously spotty. Sure, there are pockets that serve well-made pastas — at Ferrari’s Italian Villa in Grapevine and at Eataly in NorthPark Center, for example — but beyond those, things tend to get shaky.

Knife Italian is a surprisingly ambitious restaurant in the Ritz-Carlton Dallas at Las Colinas hotel from accomplished chef John Tesar that swaggers with Italian authenticity. Photo by Michael Hiller

Enter Knife Italian, a surprisingly ambitious restaurant in the Ritz-Carlton Dallas at Las Colinas hotel from accomplished chef John Tesar that swaggers with Italian authenticity. The restaurant is fitted with flamboyant nods to the Italian Riviera, plush upholstery, and a separate champagne and caviar bar area near the entrance.

Tesar, who’s a wiz with seafood and dry-aged steaks, plucks a few of the biggest hits from his two Knife steakhouses and his Michelin-starred Knife & Spoon restaurant in Orlando for the menu here, adding handmade pastas as an exclamation point.

Perhaps because he’s a native New Yorker, his hands seem to know the secrets to rolling, filling and shaping pastas (squid ink bucatini and lobster agnolotti are among the standout options). You won’t go wrong ordering bigeye tuna or a prime New York strip steak dry-aged for 120 days as the persuasive center of a meal, but amplify that with one or two pastas to share. You can try the others on your next visit, which you’ll likely book at the host stand on the way out.

4150 N. MacArthur Blvd., Irving, knifeitalian.com

The Saint

“If I could eat this duck every day, I’d never eat chicken again,” says
Jacob Williamson, the notable chef and co-owner of The Saint in East Dallas. You’ll likely share his sentiment once you try his lacquered, crisp-skinned version. Williamson’s menu bounces with a wild-child personality that’s less predictable than at 560, the Wolfgang Puck restaurant Williamson once helmed atop Reunion Tower. Steak is the menu’s nucleus, but we’d return for the pillowy ricotta gnocchi and Williamson’s pan-seared scallops slicked with beurre blanc and perfumed with spicy ‘nduja.

2633 Gaston Ave., Dallas, thesaintdallas.com

Sanjh’s menu offers nods to familiar dishes — paneer cheese, butter chicken, Punjabi-spiced lamb — but the flavors here are electric, each component laser-focused on from-scratch authenticity. Photo courtesy of Sanjh

Sanjh Restaurant & Bar

You can find restaurants specializing in Indian dishes throughout DFW, but you’ll find only one with the lineage of Sanjh, where Balpreet Singh Chadha and a brigade of other talented, India-born chefs pay homage to their native cuisine. Condé Nast Traveller India magazine tapped Chada for its 2023 list of “40 Under 40: India’s most exciting young chefs,” and his team’s cooking shines at this elegant, new Las Colinas restaurant that backs up to Lake Carolyn.

His food closely resembles what you ate on your last trip to New Delhi and ping pongs from one side of the country to the other. While there are nods to familiar dishes — paneer cheese, butter chicken, Punjabi-spiced lamb — the flavors here are electric, each component laser-focused on from-scratch authenticity.

Good Indian restaurants course through this Irving neighborhood, but they don’t coexist with such high refinement and pleasure. Go now before everyone else discovers this place.

5250 N. O’Connor Blvd., Irving, sanjhrestaurant.com