New York Subs closed after 53 years near SMU. Sevy's Grill turned off the lights in June after nearly three decades near Preston Center. In the same twelve-month window, an Austin sushi darling opened on Oak Lawn Avenue, a Milanese institution announced its first Texas address a mile east, and the hotel at Mockingbird finished a top-to-bottom renovation that swapped out its signature steakhouse. If you have lived inside the 75205 for more than a few years, you have watched a lot of block-level change happen at once.
The through-line isn't turnover for its own sake. Highland Park's dining and retail center of gravity is quietly rebalancing. The Village is still the Village. But the reasons a resident might drive east on Mockingbird or south on Preston are multiplying in a way they weren't three years ago, and the openings on the calendar for late 2026 are going to accelerate that.
The Shops of Highland Park lands a first-outside-Austin
The most talked-about opening on Oak Lawn happened on June 30. Neighborhood Sushi opened at 4216 Oak Lawn Ave. in The Shops of Highland Park, from Austin's MML Hospitality, the group led by Larry McGuire, Tom Moorman, and Liz Lambert. The Dallas location is the restaurant's first outpost outside of Austin. It took over the former Tulum space.
For residents, the practical detail is the schedule. It's now open Monday through Friday for lunch from 11:30 to 3:30, snacks 3:30 to 4:30, happy hour 3 to 5, and dinner 4:30 to 10; on Saturday and Sunday it runs an all-day menu from 11:30 to 4:30 and dinner from 4:30 to 10. That happy-hour overlap between the snack window and dinner is unusual for the corridor, and it makes a 4 p.m. drop-in on the way home from Preston Center realistic in a way most Highland Park sit-downs aren't.
The parent group matters here. MML also runs Clark's Oyster Bar and a handful of hotels, which is the kind of operator that tends to stay for the second lease term. That's a different signal than the parade of concept-flip spaces the corridor has absorbed in the past.
Knox Street is not a rumor anymore
Walk east from Highland Park Village and the biggest change on the horizon is not another storefront swap. It is a full mixed-use block coming online. The Knox Street development, a joint venture of BDT & MSD Partners, Trammell Crow Company, Highland Park Village Associates, and The Retail Connection, spans more than one million square feet and will deliver 150,000 square feet of office space, 100,000 square feet of retail, a 27-story, 186-unit apartment tower, a half-acre park with a direct connection to the Katy Trail, and The Knox Hotel and Residences, a 140-room hotel and 47 ultra-luxury condominiums operated by the Auberge Collection.
The anchor food tenant is the one to know. In June 2025, Sant Ambroeus announced Knox Street as the location of its first Texas outpost. Anchoring the base of The Lora and overlooking Knox Street Park, the restaurant will offer all-day dining, an elegant café, and dedicated outdoor patio seating. The 7,800 square-foot Dallas outpost will overlook the Katy Trail. That is a large footprint for an all-day café concept, and it sits at the base of the residential tower directly on the trail.
Retail is filling in around it. Kith opened its first Texas store at the corner of Knox Street and McKinney Avenue in the former Anthropologie space, with signature collections, exclusive collaborations, footwear, and a Kith Treats bar just inside the entrance serving cereal-infused ice cream. In December 2025, a group of lifestyle retail brands confirmed plans to open at Knox Street, three of which will be Texas debuts: DÔEN, STAUD, TOTEME, and TWP.
The timeline is worth pinning down. The Knox Hotel and Residences is set to debut in late 2026, with the private residences nearly sold out ahead of completion, and the nine-story, 150,000-square-foot office building at 3333 Knox is also scheduled for delivery in late 2026 and has been 100% preleased since fall 2024. Preleased office space is the tell. When a Dallas office building fills before it opens in 2026, the corridor around it stops being speculative.
The Highland hotel resets its restaurant
Closer to home, the Park Cities hotel visible from Mockingbird finished its renovation and traded in its signature restaurant. At the recently renovated Highland hotel in the Park Cities, The Reserve took over the former Knife restaurant space. The menu features grilled tallow oysters, lobster Amatriciana, Dover sole meunière, hanger steak frites, and a crispy chicken sandwich.
For residents who used Knife as their default hotel-lobby dinner for out-of-town guests, the swap changes the calculus. Steakhouse became grille. Beef program traded some square footage to seafood and pasta. Same valet, different reason to book.
What closed, what came next
The subtractions are easier to feel than the additions. Here is the shorthand version.
| Closed in 2025-2026 | What it means for the block |
|---|---|
| Sevy's Grill, near Preston Center (June 2026, after ~30 years) | A lunch anchor for the north end gone; expect turnover in the space to lag the closure |
| New York Subs, near SMU (after 53 years) | Campus-adjacent quick lunch loses a fixture; likely re-tenants toward campus foot traffic rather than neighborhood regulars |
| Knife at The Highland | Replaced in-place by The Reserve; same address, different program |
| Tulum, 4216 Oak Lawn Ave. | Replaced in-place by Neighborhood Sushi |
Two of those are true losses. Two are same-address reboots. The pattern is telling: the corridor is not shrinking, but the independent legacy operators are the ones exiting, and the replacements skew toward multi-market groups. That has implications for how quickly menus refresh, how staffing gets managed, and how likely a given room is to still be there in five years. A restaurant broker's Q2 2026 read on Dallas put it this way: critical recognition does not pay the rent, and legacy operators who have been running on momentum need to consider their exit before the market forces one.
Why the Village still holds
None of this diminishes Highland Park Village itself. Built in 1931 and widely regarded as the country's first true shopping center, the Village is internationally recognized for its architectural significance and mix of luxury retailers including Cartier, CHANEL, Christian Louboutin, Dior, Hermès, and Van Cleef & Arpels. The dining lineup inside the Village has proved durable in a way most Dallas retail cannot claim.
- Cafe Pacific at 33a Highland Park Village, the seafood room that has anchored the northwest corner for four decades
- Bistro 31, the European bistro in the Art Deco corner space
- Sadelle's, the New York-import all-day room from the Carbone group
- Toulouse, the Parisian-styled bistro at 24 Highland Park Village
- RH Rooftop at RH Dallas on Knox, for the skylit garden lunch that has quietly become a residents' default
These aren't news. That is the point. Against a year of turnover, the Village is functioning the way it has since Woodrow Wilson was still a recent memory, which is why it keeps the neighborhood's dining gravity even as Knox Street builds its case.
A resident's short list for the next quarter
If you plan the next three months of dinners around what actually changed, the compressed version looks like this:
- Book Neighborhood Sushi for a weekday happy hour before it stops being possible to walk in.
- Try The Reserve at The Highland once, so you know whether it belongs in the rotation before your parents visit at Thanksgiving.
- Watch for a soft-open date on Sant Ambroeus at The Lora. The hotel and residences target late 2026, and the café will likely front-run the hotel opening.
- Stop into Kith at Knox and McKinney if only to see what the former Anthropologie footprint became.
- Keep Cafe Pacific and Bistro 31 as your defaults. They are earning that status again by not changing.
The larger point for anyone who has lived in the 75205 for a while: the corridor is not becoming something unrecognizable. It is picking up a second dense node a mile east of the Village, with a hotel, a residential tower, a park connected to the Katy Trail, and a preleased office building all delivering in the same calendar window. That is a lot of concurrent completion, and it will change what a Wednesday evening looks like in a way the last decade of individual restaurant openings did not.
If you're weighing what all this means for your address specifically, we like these conversations over coffee rather than over email. Reach out to Hunter Realty Group and let's compare notes on the block, the corridor, and what's next.
