For years, the running joke about Abbot Kinney was that you could spend an entire Saturday there and still have to drive somewhere else for dinner. The boutiques closed at six, the sidewalks emptied out, and the boulevard that looked so full at noon went quiet before the sun did. That joke is getting harder to tell. Two hotels are under construction on opposite ends of the street right now, and both were designed around a single, deliberate fix: give Abbot Kinney people who don't leave at closing time.
That's not a hunch. It's the stated logic behind both projects, and it changes something more immediate than the skyline. If you live near the boulevard and you've noticed it's gotten harder to walk into your favorite restaurant on a Tuesday without a reservation, this is why, and it's going to keep happening.
The Problem the Hotels Were Built to Solve
Abbot Kinney has always run on retail hours. The boutiques, the galleries, the wellness studios, the sneaker shops, all of it draws people during the day, and a lot of those people are day-trippers who came from somewhere else in Los Angeles or from out of town, shopped for a few hours, and left before dinner service started. That pattern built one of the best shopping strips on the Westside and one of the least reliable dinner scenes, because a restaurant can't staff a full evening around a crowd that's already gone home by seven.
The fix isn't more restaurants. It's guests who are already there when dinner starts, because they're sleeping two blocks away.
What 121 Rooms Actually Change
Both hotel projects were slated for completion in the 2025-2026 window, and together they put more than a hundred rooms of overnight guests directly on the boulevard.
| Project | Location | Rooms | Anchor | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Venice Place | North end of Abbot Kinney | 78 | Felix Trattoria | Designed by local architect David Hertz, with a landscaped courtyard and multiple pedestrian entry points; Felix was named best new restaurant in America by Esquire when it opened in 2017 and earned a James Beard Award finalist nomination the following year |
| 881 Abbot Kinney | South end, at Main Street | 43 | Not specified in current reporting | Sits at the corner of Abbot Kinney and Main Street, the mirror bookend to Venice Place at the opposite end of the boulevard |
Neither hotel is replacing what's already on the street. Both were built to sit behind the existing restaurant frontage, which means the storefronts you already recognize stay put while the guest count behind them grows. That's the part locals should actually care about: the boulevard isn't being redeveloped so much as it's being given a permanent audience for dinner.
The Reservation Math Is Already Tightening
You don't need the hotels to finish leasing up to see this happening. It's already visible in what's booked and what's back.
RVR opened in October 2024 from chef Travis Lett, who spent years running the kitchen at Gjelina a few blocks away, took a five-year break, and came back to Venice with a small izakaya space that applies Japanese technique to California produce. LA Magazine named it among the city's best new restaurants for 2026. Reservations run weeks out.
The Tasting Kitchen reopened this year after a fire closed it three years ago, under founding chef Casey Lane, who first landed on Abbot Kinney in 2009. The new version, Forbes reported in August, trades the frenetic, menu-changes-daily energy of the original for something calmer and more settled. Calmer doesn't mean smaller. Dinner service runs Wednesday through Sunday, expanding to daily with late weekend hours.
Then there's ¡Salud!, which opened at 417 Washington Boulevard in late January with a ribbon-cutting hosted by the Venice Chamber of Commerce. By early March, roughly 100 locals had turned out for a Chamber mixer there. The concept is built around a split shift on purpose: specialty coffee and Latin-inspired breakfast in the morning, then mezcal cocktails and small plates after dark. That's not an accident of menu design. It's a business built to work all day, which is exactly what a street adding overnight guests needs more of.
Truly Pizza is set to round out the picture. The Orange County chain, known for a three-day fermented dough, has committed to a 4,655-square-foot space at 1239 Abbot Kinney seating around 130 people indoors and outdoors, making it one of the larger sit-down operations on the corridor. Co-founders Donna Baldwin and John Arena cited the mix of committed locals and steady visitors as the reason they picked Venice over anywhere else on the coast.
What's Actually New Right Now
If you haven't walked the full boulevard in a few months, here's what's changed on the ground:
- BADMAASH opened its third Los Angeles location at 1616 Abbot Kinney, adding steak frites with Indian spices, laal maas-style lamb chops, and the brand's first full cocktail program, per Yo! Venice
- ¡Salud! opened at 417 Washington Boulevard with its day-into-night format
- Truly Pizza has committed to 1239 Abbot Kinney for later this year
- The corridor has also added a private wellness club with a sauna and rooftop garden, a permanent jewelry and piercing studio, and several apparel storefronts, according to a recent Modern Luxury roundup
- New streetlights went in earlier this year, a small maintenance detail that matters more now that foot traffic is expected to run later into the evening
The Festival Is the Tell, Not the Story
The Abbot Kinney Festival returns on September 27, a Sunday, after being canceled two years in a row. The festival has been a Venice institution for four decades, and its absence was felt as more than a loss of foot traffic. It broke a ritual that residents built their fall calendars around.
Its return matters less as a celebration and more as a signal. The people who organize it are neighborhood volunteers, not the city, and volunteers don't commit to a full-scale street festival unless they're confident the street can handle it. Reading the calendar next to the construction schedule, the timing isn't a coincidence. The festival lands the same year both hotels are set to open, at the exact moment the boulevard's daytime draw and its overnight population are both peaking together for the first time.
First Fridays keep running on their own monthly rhythm in the meantime, with food trucks like Cousin's Maine Lobster, Kogi BBQ, and Dogtown Dogs cycling through the lineup. It's a smaller, steadier version of the same idea: give people a reason to be on Abbot Kinney after the shops have locked up.
What This Means If You Live Here
None of this requires a special trip to notice. If you're already booking a table at RVR or the Tasting Kitchen, build in more lead time than you needed a year ago. If you're driving to dinner rather than walking, expect the parking on side streets near the boulevard's north and south ends to get tighter once both hotels are leasing rooms, since that's exactly where the new guest traffic concentrates. And if you've been holding off on trying ¡Salud! or BADMAASH because they felt too new to bother with, the crowd for both is only going to build from here, not thin out.
The boulevard you've known for years isn't disappearing. It's finishing a build that's been underway for a while, and the festival on September 27 is the first weekend you'll be able to see the whole thing operating at once, daytime shoppers and overnight guests sharing the same half mile of sidewalk.
Venice changes slowly and then all at once, and the people who track those shifts closely tend to be the ones who already call this neighborhood home. If you're curious how a night like this Abbot Kinney evening actually reads against the broader Venice market, or you just want a second set of eyes the next time something on your block shifts, BGG keeps a close watch on the Westside for exactly this reason. Get Your Instant Home Valuation whenever you're ready to see what these changes mean for your own address.
