The New Restaurants on Abbot Kinney Aren't the Story. The Two Hotels Bookending Them Are.

Ask anyone who has lived near Abbot Kinney for the last few years what's different this summer and they'll start listing restaurants. The Tasting Kitchen is back. Salud is packed at brunch. There's a steakhouse near the boardwalk now. All true, and all secondary to what's actually driving the change: two hotel projects going up at opposite ends of the same mile-long street, at the same time, for the first time in the boulevard's history.

That distinction matters if you live here, because it explains why this particular wave of openings feels different from the last one. Abbot Kinney has cycled through restaurants for decades. What it hasn't had, until now, is a reliable source of overnight guests. Day-trippers browse, eat lunch, and leave by six. Hotel guests order dessert, come back for coffee the next morning, and fill a Tuesday dinner reservation that a tourist economy alone never could. That's the mechanism behind everything else on this list.

Two Corners, One Bet

At the northern end of the boulevard, a 78-room hotel called Venice Place is being built into an existing block, designed by local architect David Hertz. The project keeps the existing restaurant frontage facing Abbot Kinney and adds a landscaped courtyard with several pedestrian entry points, so the street-level experience doesn't disappear behind a hotel lobby. Felix Trattoria, the restaurant that Esquire named the best new spot in America when it opened in 2017 and that earned a James Beard finalist nod the following year, anchors the food side of that corner.

At the southern end, where Abbot Kinney meets Main Street, a three-story project called 881 Abbot Kinney has been under construction since its building permit was granted in August 2022. Designed by Venice architect Robert Thibodeau on a nearly 30,000-square-foot lot that once belonged to former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, it's set to bring 43 guest rooms, five condominiums, and just over 1,100 square feet of ground-floor retail to that corner, with a completion target originally set for this spring. Whether it lands exactly on schedule or slips a season, the calculation behind it is the same one Venice Place is built on. A chef weighing whether Venice can support a serious dinner program used to be betting on foot traffic alone. Now they're betting on beds.

The Chefs Who Made That Bet

Travis Lett spent years running the kitchen at Gjelina a few blocks away before stepping back for five years. His return came in the form of RVR, an izakaya that LA Magazine named among the best new restaurants in Los Angeles this year. It was the most talked-about opening on this end of the Westside in late 2024, and it landed before either hotel had a shovel in the ground, which tells you these operators were reading the same signal early.

Casey Lane made a similar bet, on a bigger scale. He opened the original Tasting Kitchen on Abbot Kinney in 2009 at 25 years old, fresh from Portland and by his own account with no idea what he'd been handed. The restaurant became a defining spot on the street, the kind of place Jonathan Gold wrote about and that earned four James Beard semifinalist nods before a fire closed it in 2023. Lane reopened it this July at 1633 Abbot Kinney, in the same space, with the original olive tree that used to grow in the dining room salvaged and replanted. The restaurant ran limited hours through its first weeks and moves to a full seven-day schedule with late weekend service this August. Lane described the street the way someone does when they've watched it for seventeen years: "The street feels better than ever right now."

Then there's Sydney Hunter III, whose résumé runs through L'Orangerie, Bastide, and six years helping run Petit Trois, who opened Venice Steakhouse on Pacific Avenue near the boardwalk last fall with longtime Venetian Patrick Brunet, who also has a hand in Owa and Roosterfish nearby. The house specialty is a wet aged rib cap they call the Venice Steak, and it is not named for the neighborhood as a marketing gimmick so much as an inside joke that happens to be accurate.

Two more data points round out the picture. Salud, a Latin-inspired café and cocktail bar at 417 Washington Boulevard, opened in late January with a ribbon cutting hosted by the Venice Chamber of Commerce. By early March, roughly 100 locals turned out for a Chamber mixer there, which is a fast timeline for a new spot to become a place people actually organize around. It runs coffee and churro waffles through the morning, then shifts to mezcal and tapas after dark, a split-shift format that only makes sense on a street trying to fill both ends of the day. And later this year, a Dana Point pizza favorite makes its Venice debut on Abbot Kinney, mirroring its original location's greenery-filled design in a space built to seat close to 130 people, one of the bigger sit-down footprints the corridor has absorbed in years.

What Landed When

The Festival Was Never the Problem. Its Absence Was.

The Abbot Kinney Festival has run for 40 years, historically drawing around 350 vendors, food trucks, and music stages down the full length of the boulevard, along with crowds the festival's own organizers put at over 100,000 people in a typical year. It was canceled in both 2024 and 2025. Organizers, who are community volunteers rather than city staff, confirmed it returns on Sunday, September 27, 2026, citing the extra time as a chance to restructure the event rather than just relaunch it as-is.

That gap mattered beyond lost foot traffic for one day a year. The festival was the one moment that reliably pulled the entire neighborhood together and gave newer residents a reason to walk blocks they usually skip. Its return this September lands on a street that looks nothing like the one it left. Salud will have been open for eight months. Venice Steakhouse will have a full year behind it. The new Dana Point pizza spot may be serving its first season. Either hotel could plausibly be welcoming its first guests. The crowd that shows up in late September will be meeting a boulevard shaped by all of this while the festival sat dormant.

The Rituals That Never Stopped

None of this changes the two fixtures that already structure a Venice week. The Venice Farmers' Market still runs every Friday, year-round, from 7 to 11 a.m. at 500 N. Venice Boulevard, rain or shine, and vendors stop serving walk-ups the moment the clock hits eleven. First Friday still happens on the first Friday of every month, 5 to 9:30 p.m., when the boulevard's stores stay open late and a rotating food truck lineup takes over the sidewalks. This August's roster, confirmed for the 7th, includes Cousin's Maine Lobster, 8e8 Thai, Cali Craving, and a dozen others working the same stretch of pavement that will host the festival crowds seven weeks later.

If you're planning around the next First Friday or the festival itself, the shape of a typical evening on the boulevard right now looks something like this:

1. Start at the farmers market that Friday morning if the date lines up, since the Venice market only runs until 11 a.m. and doesn't repeat later in the day.
2. Walk the boulevard before 5 p.m. while the shops are still on their normal hours, before First Friday traffic fills the sidewalks.
3. Eat from the food trucks rather than trying to book a table at Salud or Tasting Kitchen on a night when every restaurant on the strip is also busy with regular dinner service.
4. Save the sit-down reservation for a weeknight, when the split-shift places like Salud are easier to get into and the street itself is quieter.

Why This Is Worth Tracking, Not Just Reading

A street doesn't usually change because of what two hotels are doing to its skyline. It changes because of what those hotels let the businesses at street level believe about a Tuesday night. That's the actual story on Abbot Kinney this year, and it's one that shows up in occupancy numbers and reservation books before it ever shows up in a headline.

Jenny Morant Group tracks these shifts because they shape what a block is worth long before that shows up in a listing description. If you want a read on how a specific stretch of Venice is actually trending right now, reach out directly or get your instant home valuation.