The vendor booths went up along Abbot Kinney on September 27, more than 300 of them by the time the street closed to cars, ahead of the festival's first run since 2023. Somewhere behind that set-up is a smaller fact that matters more if you actually live on or near this street: several of the restaurants the festival drew crowds past already had reservations booked out for weeks, festival or not.
That gap between the headline event and the block's actual condition is the thing worth understanding today. The Abbot Kinney Festival was canceled two years running after a sponsorship slowdown hit festivals across the country, and its September 27 return was treated as the comeback story. During those two years, Venice kept building on the boulevard. The restaurants, the hotels under construction, and the small businesses that kept First Fridays running through the gap all moved ahead. The festival returned to a boulevard that had changed in the meantime.
The Restaurants the Festival Walked Past
Start with what's actually cooking along the boulevard right now, because none of it happened because a festival was coming back.
RVR opened in October 2024 in the same small space chef Travis Lett once used for a short-run pop-up called MTN, a few blocks from the Gjelina kitchen he ran for years before stepping away. The izakaya applies Japanese technique to California produce, chicken karaage next to roasted sweet potato and a Santa Barbara black cod that keeps regulars coming back, and reservations still run weeks out.
BADMAASH landed its third Los Angeles location at 1616 Abbot Kinney in late March 2026, joining outposts downtown and in Fairfax. The Venice menu adds steak frites built on Indian spices and laal maas-style lamb chops alongside the group's standard butter chicken, and it's the first BADMAASH location to run a full cocktail program. The restaurant keeps a tight schedule, Wednesday through Sunday, 4 p.m. to 11 p.m., closed the two days most tourist-facing spots stay open.
Later this year, the boulevard picks up its largest single dining footprint in some time. Truly Pizza, the Orange County chain built around three-day fermented dough, has committed to a 4,655-square-foot space at 1239 Abbot Kinney seating around 130 people indoors and out. Co-founder John Arena, a world-champion pizzaiolo, has pointed to the mix of committed locals and steady visitors as the reason Venice made sense for a third location. That's a scale of commitment that doesn't get made for a one-weekend crowd.
A Return Bigger Than the Festival's
If one reopening explains the boulevard's actual mood better than the festival does, it's The Tasting Kitchen, back on Abbot Kinney at 1633 as of July 16, 2026, under founding chef Casey Lane.
Lane opened the original Tasting Kitchen in 2009, when he was 25 and, by his own account, had no idea what he'd been handed on a street that wasn't yet what it is now. The restaurant that came out of that stretch became known for handwritten menus that changed with the season, live-fire cooking, and a dining room built around a mature olive tree. It closed after a fire three years ago. The version that reopened this July keeps the same ingredient-first approach, offers both a la carte and a tasting menu, and brought on Blake Antrobus, who most recently worked at Monsieur Dior by Dominique Crenn, to run the beverage program. Dinner service expanded to seven days in August, with later weekend hours.
As Forbes reported, Lane described the boulevard's current mood plainly: the street feels better than ever right now, he said, and he's not bored by it. That's not festival talk. That's someone who watched the block empty out during a fire closure and a three-year gap, then chose to come back to it anyway.
Two Hotels Are Coming for the After-Dinner Hours
The most structural change on Abbot Kinney right now isn't a restaurant at all. It's two boutique hotels going up at opposite ends of the same street at the same time, and what they're built to fix is a problem day-trippers can't solve on their own: a boulevard full at lunch and thinning out by nine.
At the north end, the Venice Place project is a 78-room hotel designed by local architect David Hertz, built into an existing block rather than replacing it. The design keeps existing restaurant frontage facing Abbot Kinney and tucks the hotel courtyard and lobby behind it, with multiple pedestrian access points cut into the block so the street-level experience doesn't change even as rooms go in above. Felix Trattoria anchors the food side of the project, the same Felix that Esquire named the best new restaurant in America when it opened in 2017 and that picked up a James Beard Award finalist nomination the following year.
At the south end, near Main Street, a second boutique hotel with 43 rooms is going up on the same construction timeline. Both projects were slated for completion in the 2025 to 2026 window.
What that means for anyone who already lives near the boulevard is less about the buildings themselves and more about who's on the sidewalk after dark. A day-tripper eats lunch and drives home. A hotel guest is still there at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday, which is exactly the kind of demand a corridor needs to keep kitchens open past the early dinner rush. The hotels aren't changing what the street looks like from the sidewalk. They're changing who's still standing on it three hours after the sun goes down.
The Small Anchor That Didn't Need a Festival to Prove Itself
Not every sign of a busier boulevard involves a chef with a following or a hotel with an architect attached. In late January 2026, a coffee-and-mezcal spot called ¡Salud! opened at 417 Washington Blvd and held a ribbon-cutting with the Venice Chamber of Commerce on January 24. The concept runs a split shift, specialty coffee and Latin-inspired breakfast through the morning, churro waffles and iced horchata chai lattes, then mezcal cocktails and tapas after dark. By early March, a Chamber mixer at the location drew around 100 locals, a fast turnaround for a place that had been open barely six weeks.
That kind of anchor, one that works for a morning coffee run and a night out without changing character between the two, is exactly what a street with two new hotels needs. First Fridays keep running monthly on the boulevard too, with food trucks from operators including Cousin's Maine Lobster, Kogi BBQ, and Dogtown Dogs cycling through the lineup, and the street got new streetlights installed earlier this year. None of that is a headline on its own. Together it describes a boulevard being maintained by people who plan to be there next year, not just this weekend.
What's Actually Open This Week
If you're walking the boulevard this week, here's what's running on its regular schedule:
- The Tasting Kitchen, 1633 Abbot Kinney Blvd, dinner daily, with later weekend hours
- BADMAASH, 1616 Abbot Kinney Blvd, Wednesday through Sunday, 4 to 11 p.m.
- RVR, reservations run weeks out, worth booking ahead rather than walking in
- ¡Salud!, 417 Washington Blvd, split morning coffee and evening mezcal service
Venice's boardwalk runs four miles north into Santa Monica, and the canal district sits a short walk east of all of this, so a day that starts on Abbot Kinney doesn't have to end there. But the boulevard itself is carrying more of its own weight than it has in years, festival or not.
When the last booth came down on September 27, the street looked much as it had most weeks this year: busier at 9 p.m. than it used to be, with a bigger share of the people on it planning to return.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a specific address near the boulevard, John Iglar tracks Abbot Kinney closely enough to talk specifics rather than generalities. Get a Free Home Valuation.
