If you have lived in Venice for more than a few years, you have heard the "Abbot Kinney is back" story often enough to tune it out. The boulevard has been declared over, reborn, and over again on a roughly two-year cycle since the pandemic. What is happening on the street in the summer of 2026 is different, and the reason has less to do with any single opening than with a number most residents have not seen.
A December 2024 survey of the corridor by FashionNetwork counted fewer than 10 vacancies among roughly 100 storefronts along the mile-long stretch. For context, retail vacancy has been the defining Los Angeles commercial story for three straight years. Abbot Kinney is not filling back up. It is already full, and the operators moving in now are choosing it over more obvious Westside alternatives.
That is the thesis of this post. The rest is evidence.
The Operators Choosing Venice Over Santa Monica
The clearest signal is who is signing leases. These are not first-time restaurateurs testing a concept. They are chefs with fine-dining résumés who could have opened anywhere on the Westside.
| Opening | Address | Chef / Operator | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| RVR | Abbot Kinney (former MTN space) | Travis Lett (ex-Gjelina) | Open since Oct 2024 |
| The Tasting Kitchen | 1633 Abbot Kinney Blvd | Casey Lane (founding chef) | Reopened July 16, 2026 |
| ¡Salud! | 417 Washington Blvd | Latin all-day concept | Opened late Jan 2026 |
| Venice Steakhouse | 1715 Pacific Ave | Sydney Hunter III | Opened Nov 2025 |
| Truly Pizza | 1239 Abbot Kinney Blvd | Donna Baldwin, John Arena | Late 2026 |
RVR is the one everyone is talking about, and for good reason. Travis Lett ran the Gjelina kitchen a few blocks away for years, took a five-year hiatus, and returned to Venice with a small izakaya applying Japanese technique to California produce. LA Magazine named it among the best new restaurants in Los Angeles for 2026, and reservations run weeks out. The room seats a handful of people along a wall of vinyl records, and the menu keeps circling back to a Santa Barbara black cod that regulars order without looking.
Casey Lane's return to The Tasting Kitchen is the other headline. The original opened in 2009 and, more than any other room, set the tone for what Abbot Kinney dining could be. It closed in 2023 after a fire. On July 16, 2026, Lane reopened at 1633 Abbot Kinney with a menu built around live-fire cooking and a dual format that lets you order à la carte or commit to a tasting menu. Full seven-day service, including late-night weekend hours until 1 a.m., is scheduled to begin this August.
Venice Steakhouse opened in November 2025 in the former South End space at 1715 Pacific Ave. The kitchen belongs to Sydney Hunter III, whose résumé runs through L'Orangerie, Bastide, and a six-year stretch opening and operating Petit Trois. The menu is dry-aged prime cuts with French-leaning sides, including tallow fries with dijon jus and butter-bathed grilled cabbage.
And on the Washington Boulevard side of the neighborhood, ¡Salud! opened at 417 Washington Blvd in late January 2026 and held its ribbon-cutting with the Venice Chamber of Commerce on January 24. Roughly 100 locals turned out for a Chamber mixer there in early March. The concept runs a split shift: specialty coffee, churro waffles, and iced horchata chai lattes through the morning, then mezcal cocktails and tapas after dark.
Two Hotels That Change The Math
The reason serious chefs are underwriting Venice differently than they did five years ago is not sentiment. It is room count.
Overnight guests do something day-trippers cannot. They sustain dinner restaurants on Tuesday nights. They order dessert. They come back the next morning.
The Venice Place project is a 78-room boutique hotel being built into an existing block at the northern end of Abbot Kinney, designed by local architect David Hertz. The design preserves existing restaurant frontage on the boulevard, sets the hotel courtyard and lobby behind the street, and adds pedestrian access points through a landscaped courtyard. Felix Trattoria anchors the food component. When Felix opened in 2017, Esquire named it the best new restaurant in America, and it earned a James Beard Award finalist nomination the following year.
At the southern end of the street, 881 Abbot Kinney is a 43-room hotel at the corner of Abbot Kinney and Main Street. Both hotels were slated for completion in the 2025 to 2026 window.
Then there is what the Santa Monica Daily Press reported on July 28: Soho House announced a Venice Beach location for summer 2027, steps from Abbot Kinney, spanning two floors with a rooftop terrace, a movement studio, and a communal contrast suite with hammam, sauna, and cold plunge. It will be the club's fifth Los Angeles location. By its 30th anniversary in 2025, Soho House operated 46 locations worldwide and served 269,606 members.
Add those together and you get a street that, within roughly eighteen months, goes from almost no overnight capacity to more than 120 hotel rooms and a members' club purpose-built for the kind of guest who eats out every night of a trip. That is the number the chefs are running.
The Sit-Down Footprint Is About To Get Bigger
Truly Pizza, the Orange County chain known for its three-day fermented dough, has committed to a third location at 1239 Abbot Kinney Blvd. The space runs 4,655 square feet and will seat around 130 indoors and out. That is one of the larger sit-down operations on the corridor. Co-founders Donna Baldwin and John Arena, a world-champion pizzaiolo, cited Venice's blend of committed locals and steady visitors as the deciding factor. Pies range from a $19 classic cheese to a $30 Suprema.
A single pizzeria is not a headline on its own. But combined with RVR, The Tasting Kitchen, Venice Steakhouse, Felix, and the return of a full-schedule dinner rotation, it rounds out a corridor that can now hold a full evening, aperitivo through dessert, within a short walk.
The Festival Is Back On The Calendar
The Abbot Kinney Festival was canceled two years running. The 2026 edition is scheduled for Sunday, September 27, marking 40 years of the event. Because the festival is run by community volunteers rather than the city, its return is a confidence signal more than a party. The people who organize it feel the street is stable enough to commit.
A few smaller items that residents notice but rarely see written down:
- First Fridays continue monthly, with food trucks including Cousin's Maine Lobster, Kogi BBQ, and Dogtown Dogs rotating through the lineup
- The boulevard received new streetlights earlier this year
- Bodega + Palms, a revamped corner store, has taken over the longtime Mitchell's Market with a prepared-foods counter
- Meadow, a walk-up window near the Venice sign, is serving Greek frozen yogurt from two Australian founders
None of these are headlines. Together they describe a street being maintained and used by people who intend to stay.
What This Means If You Live Here
The practical takeaway for a Venice resident is that the calculus around a Tuesday dinner is different than it was in 2023. There are more rooms worth walking to, they are open more nights of the week, and the reservation windows on the best of them are starting to look like Culver City or Silver Lake rather than a beach town. If you have been treating Abbot Kinney as a weekend errand corridor, this is the summer to reset that habit.
By the time the Abbot Kinney Festival arrives on September 27, the street will have a shape it has not had before. Two hotels, a members' club under construction, five restaurants worth an out-of-town guest, and a festival back on the calendar. That is not a comeback. It is a corridor moving into a different tier.
If you own in Venice or nearby and are curious how these shifts are showing up in what your block is worth today, the team at Team Sorrentino tracks this street as closely as anyone. Book an appointment when you want a read on your own address.
