The Old Names Are Coming Back to Abbot Kinney

Walk Abbot Kinney this month and you'll notice something that doesn't fit the usual story about a commercial strip having a moment. The easy narrative is always the same: money moves in, rents climb, new operators arrive, the old guard gets priced out. That's not what's happening here. The names filling back in on this stretch of boulevard aren't new. They're the ones who built the block's reputation the first time, coming back to do it again.

Casey Lane is cooking on Abbot Kinney again. Travis Lett is too. If you've lived in Venice more than a few years, those names mean something specific, and their return matters more than another storefront changing hands.

The Three-Year Wait

The Tasting Kitchen closed after a fire in 2023. It reopened July 16 at the same address, 1633 Abbot Kinney Blvd, with the same chef who opened it in the first place. Casey Lane was 25 when he moved from Portland and took over the space in 2009, and by his own account he had no idea what he'd been handed. What he built there became one of the boulevard's defining rooms: handwritten menus that changed almost nightly, a tasting-format approach built around whatever the markets had that week, and a mature olive tree growing in the middle of the dining room that somehow survived the fire and got carefully replanted into the rebuilt space.

The new version isn't trying to recreate 2009. Lane has said the first run had a frenetic, prove-it energy, changing the menu daily because nobody knew how long the moment would last. What's different now, in his words, is a calmer pace and more confidence in what the room is. The beverage program is now led by Blake Antrobus, who came from Monsieur Dior by Dominique Crenn and before that worked with the teams at Bicyclette and Manzke. Dinner currently runs Wednesday through Sunday, with the restaurant expanding toward daily and later weekend service as August continues.

If you ate at the original Tasting Kitchen, this isn't a new restaurant borrowing an old name. It's the same person picking up where a fire interrupted him.

The Other Original

A few doors down, Travis Lett is running RVR, an izakaya he opened after stepping away from the Gjelina kitchen he'd run for years just a few blocks over. LA Magazine named RVR among the best new restaurants in Los Angeles for 2026, which is notable mostly because Lett isn't a new name discovering Venice. He's someone who left the neighborhood's food scene for five years and came back to open something different inside it.

That's two of the boulevard's most-cited returns this year, and neither one is a chain expanding into a hot market. Both are people who already have a history on this specific stretch of street, choosing to write another chapter on it rather than somewhere new.

What's Actually New

Not everything on Abbot Kinney right now is a reunion. Some of it is genuinely new, and the contrast is useful.

¡Salud! opened at 417 Washington Blvd in late January with a ribbon-cutting hosted by the Venice Chamber of Commerce, and by early March a Chamber mixer there drew roughly 100 locals. The concept runs two shifts under one roof: specialty coffee and a Latin-inspired breakfast menu through the morning, including churro waffles and iced horchata chai lattes, then mezcal cocktails and tapas after dark. It's built to work as an all-day anchor, which matters on a corridor that has always been stronger at dinner than at 9 a.m.

BADMAASH also arrived this year, its third Los Angeles location, at 1616 Abbot Kinney Blvd. The Mahendro brothers' restaurant group brought new menu items specific to this location, including steak frites with Indian spices and lamb neck korma, alongside a full cocktail program the brand hadn't run at its other spots.

Later this year, a bigger newcomer lands: Truly Pizza, the Orange County chain known for three-day fermented dough, is opening its third location at 1239 Abbot Kinney Blvd. At 4,655 square feet and seating for roughly 130 people indoors and outdoors, it's one of the largest sit-down operations the boulevard has taken on. The menu runs from a $19 classic cheese pie to a $30 Suprema, and co-founders Donna Baldwin and John Arena have pointed to Venice's mix of committed locals and steady visitor traffic as the reason they picked this block over other options.

Two boutique hotels are rising at either end of the street as well: a 78-room project at the north end designed by local architect David Hertz, built around Felix Trattoria, and a 43-room hotel at the corner of Abbot Kinney and Main. Both were slated for completion in the 2025 to 2026 window. Neither is the story on its own, but they explain something about why a restaurant like Truly Pizza is willing to bet on a 130-seat footprint here: overnight guests support a Tuesday dinner service in a way day-trip visitors never have.

This Season's Calendar, If You're Keeping Track

For residents who measure the year by what's actually happening on the street rather than what's opening, here's where things stand:

• August 9 — the monthly Venice Street Fair returned with more than 150 local artists and makers, live music, and small-business tables along the boulevard.
• First Fridays — the monthly food truck night continues, with a rotating lineup that has included Cousin's Maine Lobster, Kogi BBQ, and Dogtown Dogs.
• September 27 — the Abbot Kinney Festival returns to the boulevard after last year's edition was postponed.
• New streetlights went in on the boulevard earlier this year, a small fix but one that changes how the block feels after dark.

Why the Festival Almost Didn't Come Back

The Abbot Kinney Festival isn't a city event. It's organized by the Abbot Kinney Festival Association, a volunteer-run nonprofit that has funded community grants for youth and arts programs in Venice since 1984, putting well over $300,000 back into local organizations through festival proceeds over that span. When sponsorships slowed across festivals broadly last year, the board made the call to postpone rather than run a diminished version, with organizers saying at the time they wanted to use the pause to restructure and come back stronger in 2026.

Its return this September isn't a sign that a corporate sponsor swooped in to save it. It's a sign that the volunteers who run it decided the moment was right to commit again, the same instinct that brought Casey Lane back to his old kitchen and pulled Travis Lett back to a block he'd left five years earlier.

None of this reads like a neighborhood being discovered for the first time. It reads like one where the people who mattered the first time around decided to come back and do it again.

If you've been wondering whether the empty storefronts of a few years ago meant something had ended, the answer this year seems to be no. The people who built the reputation in the first place are the ones rebuilding it now, and the newcomers filling in around them are betting on the same thing residents already know: this particular stretch of street has never actually needed rediscovering.

For those with questions about property in Venice or anywhere else along the coast, Robert Edie is always glad to talk. Let's Connect.