What do you actually know about the block you walk to get coffee?
If you live in Venice, you've probably answered that question twice this year without meaning to. Once when you noticed a new storefront where Mitchell's Market used to be. Again when you realized the Abbot Kinney Festival, the one your calendar has marked every September since before you moved here, quietly skipped two years in a row. The festival is finally coming back on Sunday, September 27, 2026, according to the event's own site. But the boulevard it's returning to isn't the one that went dark in 2023. It spent its two lost Septembers becoming a different kind of street, and the change has almost nothing to do with what the visitor guides are about to tell you.
Two Blank Septembers
The Abbot Kinney Festival has run for forty years, a single Sunday when the boulevard closes to cars and fills with vendors, food trucks, and music from one end to the other. It went quiet in 2024 and again in 2025 while its all-volunteer organizing board restructured. That's a long pause for an event built on a rhythm most residents never had to think about. If you've lived here through both blank Septembers, you noticed the absence less as a missing afternoon and more as a missing checkpoint, the one day a year that used to pull you the full length of the boulevard whether you needed anything there or not.
The Story You'll Hear This Weekend
Walk the boulevard this month and you'll hear one version of what happened while the festival was gone: Abbot Kinney had a restaurant moment. It's not wrong. The roll call is real:
- Damian, from chef Enrique Olvera's Casamata hospitality group, opened at 1025 Abbot Kinney in June 2026 with a Pacific Coast seafood menu built around ceviches and aguachiles.
- Bodega + Palms took over the longtime Mitchell's Market space, mixing sunscreen and dog treats with breakfast burritos and coffee, a corner-store format rather than a restaurant.
- Westside Oyster Club moved into the old Blue Plate Oysterette footprint with a Cape Cod-style raw bar, clam chowder bread bowls included.
- The Tasting Kitchen, the farm-to-table Italian spot that helped kick off Abbot Kinney's restaurant renaissance when it opened in 2009, is back with its founding chef after closing in 2023 following a fire.
- Si! Mon replaced James Beach, the longtime queer neighborhood bar, with a pricier Panamanian-inflected concept from chef José Carles.
- Market took over the old 72 Market Street Oyster Bar space and turned it into an aperitivo bar with a disco ball that drops after 11pm.
- Down near the Venice sign, Meadow, a walk-up window serving Greek frozen yogurt, and Great White round out the newest food options within sight of the boardwalk.
- Truly Pizza, the Orange County chain known for its three-day fermented dough, is set to open its third location at 1239 Abbot Kinney later this year, filling one of the corridor's last visible dinner gaps.
That's a genuine wave, and it's the version of the story that will get repeated in every roundup published this week.
The Story Worth Actually Noticing
The more interesting shift happened quietly, in the retail spaces most tourist itineraries skip. A Canadian furniture company called Cozey opened a roughly 5,000-square-foot pop-up showroom at 1220 Abbot Kinney, stocked with modular sofas, rugs, and outdoor furniture, and the space is booked through December. A London-born permanent jewelry and piercing studio landed its first Los Angeles storefront a few doors down. Merz b. Schwanen, a German heritage brand known for heavyweight basics, opened a shop that one write-up described as feeling as quiet-luxury as the shirts it sells. Alohas, the Barcelona sneaker brand, converted its Abbot Kinney pop-up into a permanent address. Above the bar Only the Wild Ones, a speakeasy called Force of Nature started pouring wine sourced from women in regenerative agriculture.
None of those are restaurants, and that's the point. A watch, a couch, a T-shirt you'd actually wear to work: those aren't the things a tourist itinerary is built around. They're the things a resident buys on a Tuesday.
The occupancy numbers back up how far this has come. A December 2024 survey of the boulevard by the trade outlet FashionNetwork found fewer than 10 of the roughly 100 storefronts along the mile sitting vacant, near-full occupancy on a corridor that spent years being described as having lost the plot after GQ once called it the coolest block in America. That's happening inside a Los Angeles retail market where vacancy has been a defining headline for three consecutive years. Abbot Kinney isn't following that citywide pattern. It's filling in against it.
Two Hotels, and the Math That's About to Change
The bigger structural shift is still under construction, literally, at both ends of the boulevard.
| Property | Location | Rooms | Anchor tenant | Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Venice Place | North end, near Santa Monica line | 78 | Felix Trattoria | 2025 to 2026 completion window |
| 881 Abbot Kinney | South end, at Main Street | 43 | (retail and dining TBD) | 2025 to 2026 completion window |
Both projects were slated for that same 2025 to 2026 window as of FashionNetwork's December 2024 review. Venice Place is designed by local architect David Hertz and anchored by Felix Trattoria, the restaurant Esquire once named the best new restaurant in America.
Here's why that matters more than another restaurant opening. Abbot Kinney has functioned for roughly a decade as a corridor with almost no overnight capacity. That's forced its most in-demand dinner spots, places like RVR and Venice Steakhouse, to pull diners from across the entire Westside just to fill tables on a Tuesday night, because there was no one actually staying on the block. A hundred-plus new rooms on either end changes that math for the first time. Overnight guests sustain a dinner economy that day-trippers simply can't.
The Proof Two Blocks Over
You don't have to wait for the hotels to see this thesis already playing out. On Washington Boulevard, a few blocks south of Abbot Kinney, a concept called ¡Salud! opened at 417 Washington in late January 2026, holding its ribbon-cutting with the Venice Chamber of Commerce on January 24. It runs a split shift: specialty coffee and a Latin-inspired breakfast in the morning, mezcal cocktails and tapas after dark, the same address serving two completely different neighborhood needs depending on the hour. Roughly a hundred locals turned out for a Chamber mixer there in early March 2026, a fast timeline for a new business to feel like part of the neighborhood's actual social calendar rather than something built for visitors passing through.
That's the pattern the festival is walking back into. Not a strip that got more famous. A strip that quietly got more useful to the people who live within walking distance of it.
What to Actually Do This Week
If you're planning around the calendar, the timing works in your favor this year. The Abbot Kinney Festival lands on Sunday, September 27. The next First Friday, the monthly street party the Abbot Kinney Boulevard Association runs from roughly 5 to 11pm with a rotating food truck lineup, falls just five days later on October 2. That gives residents two chances inside the same week to walk the boulevard end to end, something a lot of people who live here haven't actually done since before 2023.
Take both. Walk past the restaurants everyone will be talking about, and pay closer attention to what's on either side of them. That's where the boulevard's real story is sitting right now.
Property values along corridors like this one tend to move on exactly this kind of shift, the kind that shows up in occupancy rates and construction permits before it ever shows up in a listing description. If you're curious what two new hotels and a resident-facing retail wave actually mean for a property on or near Abbot Kinney, Eric Haskell Group can walk you through it.
