In late January, a Latin hospitality concept called ¡Salud! opened its doors at 417 Washington Blvd. Within weeks, the Venice Chamber of Commerce held its ribbon cutting there, and by early March the same room was hosting a Chamber mixer that drew roughly a hundred locals. That is not a huge number by festival standards. It is a telling one for a brand-new operator that chose to plug into neighborhood infrastructure immediately rather than wait for a bigger crowd to discover it on its own.
That crowd is coming back this month. The Abbot Kinney Festival returns on Sunday, September 27, its 40th edition, after being called off in both 2024 and 2025. The obvious story is relief: the ritual is back. The more useful story for anyone who actually lives here is that the boulevard spent those two Septembers without its marquee event quietly deciding what kind of street it wants to be, and the answer arrived before the festival did.
Two Septembers With Nothing on the Calendar
The festival's own board framed the pause as a response to a sponsorship slowdown hitting festivals across the country, not a sign of trouble on the street itself. At full scale, the event has drawn crowds well past 100,000 people along the boulevard's full mile between Venice Boulevard and Main Street, with three stages, hundreds of vendor booths, and a food truck lineup that turns the corridor into something closer to a fairground than a shopping street. Losing that for two years in a row broke more than an afternoon of foot traffic. It broke the one day a year that reliably pulled the entire neighborhood, including residents who otherwise skip the blocks they don't need, out onto the boulevard at the same time.
What it did not do was stop the street from moving. While the festival sat dormant, Abbot Kinney kept its First Friday tradition going every month, with the food truck lineup rotating through operators like Cousin's Maine Lobster, Kogi BBQ, and Dogtown Dogs. New streetlights went in earlier this year. None of that reads as a headline on its own. Together, it describes a corridor that kept being maintained and used by people who intended to stay, festival or no festival.
The Question Restaurants Were Quietly Answering
The more interesting shift happened at the table level. In 2023, the honest answer to whether Abbot Kinney could support a serious dinner program past 9 p.m. was unclear. The boardwalk pulled daytime tourists, the boulevard tended to close early, and residents who wanted a proper evening out often drove to Santa Monica or Culver City to get it.
That started changing quietly. Travis Lett, who spent years running the kitchen at Gjelina a few blocks away before a five-year break, opened his izakaya RVR at the same address where he once ran MTN. It landed on LA Magazine's list of the best new restaurants in Los Angeles for 2026, and reservations now run weeks out for a menu built around chicken karaage, hand rolls, and a Santa Barbara black cod that regulars keep reordering. A chef with Lett's track record choosing Venice, and staying, is the kind of signal other operators read closely before signing a lease of their own.
The Tasting Kitchen made a similar bet. Chef Casey Lane, who first opened the restaurant at 1633 Abbot Kinney back in 2009 and earned praise from Jonathan Gold along with four consecutive James Beard semifinalist nods, reopened it this summer. The revival runs a dual format, a curated tasting menu alongside à la carte, and this August the restaurant moved to a full seven-day schedule with hours running until 1 a.m. That is not a lunch spot hedging its bets. It is a business betting on a Tuesday night crowd that did not reliably exist on this street five years ago.
Two Hotels at Opposite Ends of the Same Mile
The clearest evidence that operators believe the bet is the arrival of overnight rooms, something Abbot Kinney has not had in decades.
| Venice Place | 881 Abbot Kinney | |
|---|---|---|
| Location | North end, 1021-1033 Abbot Kinney Blvd | South end, corner of Abbot Kinney and Main |
| Rooms | 78 | 43 guest rooms plus 5 condominiums |
| Architect | David Hertz | Robert Thibodeau, Design Universal |
| Anchor tenant | Felix Trattoria | 1,183 sq ft ground-floor retail |
| Site notes | Eight contiguous lots, across from Westminster Elementary | Four contiguous lots on a 29,589 sq ft parcel once owned by Arnold Schwarzenegger, 177 underground parking spaces |
| Target window | 2025-2026 | 2025-2026, permit issued August 2022 |
Felix Trattoria, which Esquire named the best new restaurant in America when it opened in 2017 and which earned a James Beard Award finalist nomination the following year, already has a loyal following on its own. Wrapping a 78-room hotel around it changes the math considerably. The same goes for the corner property at Main Street, designed by a Venice-based architect who sits on the Venice Neighborhood Council and who has built much of his career on private homes just streets away.
A block that only has to survive daylight hours does not need overnight beds. Abbot Kinney just started building two hotels' worth of them, and that is a different kind of commitment than a new coffee shop or a seasonal pop-up.
What Filled In Behind Them
A corridor survey conducted in December 2024 found fewer than 10 of the roughly 100 storefronts along the mile-long stretch sitting vacant. That is close to full occupancy on a Los Angeles commercial corridor at a moment when retail vacancy has been a defining citywide problem for three consecutive years running.
What filled those gaps is worth naming directly:
- Si! Mon took over the old James Beach space, with Panama City chef José Carles cooking Chinese, Spanish, and Afro-Caribbean influenced small plates.
- Damian, from Enrique Olvera's Casamata hospitality group, opened in June 2026 at 1025 Abbot Kinney Blvd with a Pacific Coast seafood menu built around ceviches and aguachiles.
- BADMAASH, the Los Angeles Indian restaurant group founded in 2013 by brothers Nakul and Arjun Mahendro, planted its third location at 1616 Abbot Kinney.
- Truly Pizza, a Southern California chain known for three-day fermented dough, is opening a roughly 130-seat location at 1239 Abbot Kinney later this year, its largest format on the corridor to date.
- Bodega + Palms took over the longtime Mitchell's Market storefront with a corner-store mix of coffee, breakfast burritos, sunscreen, and dog treats.
- Cozey, a Montreal furniture brand, opened a roughly 5,000 square foot showroom at 1220 Abbot Kinney on April 8, 2026, booked through its planned close in December.
- Force of Nature, a speakeasy tucked above the bar Only the Wild Ones, is the project of Crudo e Nudo's Leena Culhane, pouring wine and cocktails sourced from women in regenerative culinary practice.
Not all of that is dinner. A couch, a pair of running shoes, or a bag of dog treats is not what a tourist itinerary is built around. It is what a resident buys on an ordinary Tuesday, and its presence alongside the restaurant wave suggests the street is filling in for daily errands, not just special occasions.
What Sunday Actually Looks Like
The festival itself runs its usual hours, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., along the full stretch from Venice Boulevard to Main Street. Free bike valet stations sit at both ends of the route, and a 21-and-over VIP garden section is available for a $40 donation that goes back into the festival's community grants program, which has invested more than $300,000 into Venice nonprofits since 1984. The Spirit of Venice Award, first presented in 1989 to descendants of Abbot Kinney the same year the street was renamed in his honor, remains part of the day's program.
For anyone who lives along the route, the more practical detail is timing. Parking tightens for the entire weekend before the festival, not just Sunday itself, so residents with driveways along the corridor or on side streets within a couple of blocks will want to keep them clear well ahead of the date. Historic attendance has filled the boulevard curb to curb, and errands or dog walks are easier to plan around the closure window than through it.
The crowd walking onto Abbot Kinney on September 27 is not stepping back into the street it left in 2023. It is walking into one that spent two Septembers without its biggest annual gathering and used the time to decide, block by block, what it wanted to become. The festival is a good reason to notice all of it at once. The changes were already there.
If you live in Venice and want a running read on how the neighborhood keeps shifting, from what opens on the boulevard to what it means for the block you're on, Megan Whalen is always glad to talk it through. Let's connect.
