When did you last actually park on Ocean Park Boulevard between 27th Street and the airport fence line? For most of Sunset Park, the honest answer is never. That stretch sat between the beachier restaurants clustered near Lincoln and the low office buildings ringing Santa Monica Airport, the kind of in-between block where you noticed the traffic light more than the storefronts.
That's the part of the boulevard that's actually changed. Not the beach end, which has had a small food cluster for a while now. The business-park end, the part everyone tuned out, is where a shuttered Coffee Bean turned into a restaurant doing 1,400 to 1,500 covers a week, and where a stretch of parking-lot-adjacent office space became a members-only dog club with a coffee bar.
A former Coffee Bean is now doing 300 covers in one weekend
Cosetta opened in spring 2025 at 3150 Ocean Park Blvd, in the space that had been a Coffee Bean and, before that, Mrs. Winston's Green Grocery. Chef Zach Pollack, known for Alimento in Silver Lake and Cosa Buona in Echo Park, spent three years on planning, construction, and delays before opening the doors. The reception surprised even him. Within weeks of opening, he told the Santa Monica Daily Press that the restaurant was doing somewhere between 1,400 and 1,500 covers a week at dinner alone, with 300 covers across a single Friday and Saturday. More than a year later, the patio is still one of the harder reservations on this stretch of the boulevard.
Eater's Matthew Kang put a finer point on why that number matters here specifically. His review, republished on Postcard, described Cosetta as beckoning from a sparsely occupied business park off Ocean Park, and noted that despite the unremarkable address, locals had already claimed the string-light patio as their own. That's the part locals already sensed but hadn't quite named. The location was never the draw. The people showing up anyway are the story.
Pollack has said he isn't chasing a second location. He wants to make this one work, for the neighborhood that's already filling it.
The dog club two doors down
A few blocks east, at 3440 Ocean Park Blvd, sits DOG PPL, a members-only canine social club tucked inside the Santa Monica Business Park. Membership runs $120 a month for one dog, with a discounted rate for additional dogs in the same household. Every dog gets a temperament evaluation before admission, and the staff, who go by "rufferees," handle supervision while members work or sit with a coffee.
It is an unusual thing to build in a business park. It is also proof of the same pattern as Cosetta: a stretch of Ocean Park Boulevard that used to be strictly functional, the kind of block where you'd get your car smogged or drop off dry cleaning, now has a line of paying members most mornings.
If a $120 monthly membership isn't the move for your household, the city-owned alternative sits a short walk north. Marine Park, tucked off Ocean Park Boulevard near the airport, allows dogs off leash and has an auditorium, picnic areas, lighted fields, and a playground, all free to use. Clover Park, the neighborhood's larger green space at 17 acres, anchors the family side of Sunset Park with baseball diamonds and walking paths. Between the two of them and the paid club, Sunset Park now has three genuinely different ways to spend an hour with a dog on the same half mile of road.
The beach end never needed convincing
Closer to Lincoln, the boulevard's other food cluster has been quietly running for longer. Ghisallo, at 1622 Ocean Park Blvd, serves wood-fired Neapolitan-style pizza with a back patio that regulars treat as a second living room. Earlier this year, chef Casey Lane took over the kitchen and began working alongside baker Jyan Horwitz of the neighboring Jyan Isaac Bread, refining two house pizza doughs while keeping the daytime slice menu intact. Next door, Layla Bagels has become enough of a fixture that a weekend line stretching thirty minutes barely registers as news anymore.
This end of Ocean Park Boulevard was never the overlooked part. It's the contrast that makes the business-park stretch interesting: one end of the same street had already figured out how to draw people in, and the other end just caught up.
What closed, and what's filling in behind it
Turnover on a commercial strip usually reads as loss. Here it's worth looking at what actually moved in behind each closure, because the replacements are rarely a like-for-like swap.
- Bud's Deli, a 35-year fixture at 2727 Ocean Park Blvd, closed after a lease dispute. Juicy Ladies, an organic juice bar with existing locations in Pacific Palisades and Woodland Hills, has a notice up for the same address.
- The former OP Cafe space at 3117 Ocean Park Blvd is being taken over by Pontu, a still-forming concept promising Peruvian food with a local focus.
- Antequera Bakery's old spot at 1704 Ocean Park Blvd is becoming a branch of Des Croissants Paris, a French boulangerie that already sells at several area farmers markets and runs a storefront in Culver City.
- Shaka Shack gave up its space at 1701 Ocean Park Blvd. A branch of Handel's Homemade Ice Cream is expected to take it over.
- Shunji Japanese Cuisine now operates at 3003 Ocean Park Blvd, one of the entries on the City of Santa Monica's own list of new local business openings.
None of these are large national chains replacing local shops. Almost every new tenant on this list is itself a small operator, often one already established somewhere else in Los Angeles and expanding into Sunset Park specifically. That's a different story than a strip mall losing its character. It reads more like operators who've watched the boulevard fill in deciding it's worth a second location here.
Why the business-park stretch stayed quiet for so long
Part of the explanation is geography that predates any of this. The eastern end of Ocean Park Boulevard runs along the edge of Santa Monica Airport, and for decades that meant office parks, aviation-adjacent tenants, and a general sense that this was the utilitarian part of the neighborhood. Locals bike the Santa Monica Airport Bike Path for the low-traffic route, not for a reason to stop.
That's set to change on a fixed timeline. Under a Consent Decree the city reached with the FAA, Santa Monica Airport will close to all aeronautical use at midnight on December 31, 2028. The roughly 192 acres of land the airport currently occupies are slated to become a public "Great Park" once flights stop. Aviation activity here has been winding down for years, not expanding, and that's part of why this stretch of Ocean Park Boulevard was built around offices and hangars rather than foot traffic in the first place. It's one more reason its recent turnover is worth noticing rather than shrugging off as ordinary retail churn.
The map, if you're deciding where to walk this weekend
If you want pizza and a bagel line that's already a known quantity, the 1600 block near Lincoln still delivers. If you want to see what a former Coffee Bean turned into, or bring the dog somewhere new, the 2700 to 3400 stretch near the business park is where the actual change has been happening. Marine Park and Clover Park sit between the two clusters, free and open to everyone regardless of which end of the boulevard you're drawn to.
Sunset Park has always had the bones of a neighborhood people stay in for decades. What's new is that the least glamorous stretch of its main commercial street stopped being something people simply pass through.
If you're curious about what any of this means for a specific block or property in Sunset Park, Megan Whalen is always glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.
