For two Septembers in a row, the last Sunday of the month came and went on Abbot Kinney Boulevard without the thing that has defined it for four decades. No stages. No 300-plus vendor booths lining both sides of the street. No 150,000 people shoulder to shoulder between Venice Boulevard and Main Street. The Abbot Kinney Festival Board cited a sponsorship slowdown that hit festivals across the country, and said the pause would give them room to restructure. This year, on Sunday, September 27, the festival is confirmed to return, running its usual 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Here's the part that doesn't show up in the festival announcement: the boulevard didn't sit still while its biggest annual gathering was gone. It spent those two years quietly rebuilding itself into something that looks less like a strip of shops waiting for a block party and more like a small hospitality district that happens to also throw one.
Walk the boulevard right now and the restaurant lineup alone tells a different story than it did the last time the festival actually happened.
The Tasting Kitchen reopened this summer at 1633 Abbot Kinney under Chef Casey Lane, who first put the restaurant on the map back in 2009. The original run earned praise from Jonathan Gold and four consecutive James Beard semifinalist nods, the kind of track record that doesn't come back to a neighborhood by accident. The revival runs a dual format, a curated tasting menu alongside à la carte, and the restaurant is moving to a full seven-day schedule with late-night hours running until 1 a.m. this August.
A few doors down, RVR opened as chef Travis Lett's return to the same address where he once ran MTN, and it's already earned a spot on rundowns of the best restaurants in Venice Beach this year. BADMAASH, the Los Angeles Indian restaurant group founded in 2013 by brothers Nakul and Arjun Mahendro, planted its third location at 1616 Abbot Kinney, joining outposts in downtown L.A. and Fairfax. And later this year, Truly Pizza, the Orange County chain known for three-day fermented dough, is bringing its third location to the boulevard, a space built to seat nearly 130 guests indoors and out.
None of these are pop-ups testing the water. They're full buildouts from operators with real track records, betting on a street that spent two festival-less years proving it didn't need the crowd to stay busy.
The more structurally significant change isn't on a menu at all. It's in the ground.
At the northern end of the boulevard, the Venice Place Project is building a 78-room hotel designed by local architect David Hertz, with a landscaped courtyard and multiple pedestrian access points woven into the existing block rather than walled off from it. The project preserves the restaurant frontage that already exists on Abbot Kinney, and Felix Trattoria anchors the food side of it, the same Felix that Esquire named the best new restaurant in America when it opened in 2017 and that earned a James Beard Award finalist nomination the following year. At the southern end, near Main Street, a second boutique hotel is going up at the same time.
Two hotel projects on one street in the same window is worth sitting with for a second. A boulevard built for day-trippers doesn't need overnight beds. A boulevard that wants dinner reservations at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday does. The restaurant wave described above only fully makes sense next to this one. Fine dining that runs late into the night needs a customer base that isn't racing to beat traffic home, and two hotels worth of guests solves that math in a way that foot traffic from Santa Monica or the Westside never quite does on its own.
Not every new arrival waited for permission from the calendar, either. Salud, a Latin hospitality concept that opened its doors earlier this year, hosted a Venice Chamber of Commerce mixer within weeks of opening. Roughly 100 locals turned out for it in early March, which is a small number in absolute terms and a telling one in context: it means a brand-new operator chose to plug into existing neighborhood infrastructure almost immediately rather than treating the Chamber as an afterthought. That's a different posture than a business simply renting a storefront and hoping the boulevard's reputation does the marketing for it.
Abbot Kinney gets most of the headlines, but the neighborhood's actual rhythm this month has run wider than one street.
Earlier this month, the Venice Basketball League marked its 20th anniversary with a two-day Legends Weekend at the Venice Beach courts on Ocean Front Walk. Saturday was Women's Legends Day, with youth showcase games and a Venice Women's League matchup against the Women's Drew League, plus appearances from WNBA players. Sunday, designated Ron Beals Day, opened with a free youth clinic led by social media personality Tristan Jass alongside former NBA players Craig Smith and Cedric Ceballos and streetball figure Skip to My Lou, running into 40-and-over and 50-and-over tournaments, a three-point shootout, a dunk contest, and the VBL Championship Cup finals.
A few days before that, the Festival of the Chariots brought three large chariots down from Santa Monica to Venice Beach, organized by ISKCON with free entertainment and a vegetarian feast along the route. Neither event needed Abbot Kinney's festival to justify a crowd showing up. They're evidence that the neighborhood's social calendar has been running at full speed the entire time the boulevard's marquee event sat dormant.
Vendor applications for this year's festival opened April 1, and by the time the last Sunday in September arrives, the boulevard those vendors set up on will look different from the one that hosted the festival before its hiatus. There are more hotel rooms under construction than there were the last time this happened. There's a reopened institution with a James Beard pedigree back on a full schedule. There's a new restaurant group's third location and an izakaya from one of the city's more closely watched chefs, both drawing crowds that never needed a festival banner to find them.
None of this makes the festival's return less worth marking. If anything, it means the day will carry more weight this time, because the street throwing the party spent its two years off actually becoming something, rather than just waiting to be noticed again.
Living in Venice means watching a boulevard rewrite itself in real time, one lease and one groundbreaking at a time, whether or not anyone's counting. Davis + Burns Group keeps a close eye on what's actually changing on the ground here, not just what shows up on a festival flyer, because that's the kind of detail that matters whenever a Westside conversation turns from a Tuesday night dinner reservation to a longer-term decision about the neighborhood. If you're curious what any of this means for your corner of Venice, we're always glad to talk it through.
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