Saturday morning at Cheviot Hills Park splits into two crowds that rarely mix. Golfers finish their rounds near the 18th green and walk past a clubhouse that has been under construction, in one form or another, for years. Dog owners cycle through the dog park a few hundred feet away. Neither group has anywhere at the park itself to sit down afterward. So they scatter across Pico Boulevard instead, some toward the biscuit line at John O'Groats, others toward the pastry case at Ludivine Paris, two doors apart and yet somehow never crossing paths with the people they just shared a fairway or a fenced-in patch of grass with.
That split has been the quiet norm here for so long that most residents have stopped noticing it. What they may not have noticed is that the city just signed the paperwork to end it.
A Building That's Been Empty Longer Than People Remember
Rancho Park Golf Course opened in 1949, designed by William P. Bell and William H. Johnson on the site of a private club that the federal government seized over unpaid taxes. It debuted with the 1949 U.S.G.A. Public Links Championship and went on to host eighteen Los Angeles Opens, the tournament where Arnold Palmer made his infamous 12 on the 18th hole in 1961, a hole golfers here still bring up unprompted. The course sits inside a 200-acre park the city created in 1945, the same footprint that now holds the tennis courts, the archery range, the ball fields and the rec center.
None of that history has translated into a working restaurant. Course reviews on 18Birdies posted this July still describe unfinished amenities, with one golfer writing that they wish the operator would just refurbish the course already. That sentiment lines up with what a city board report from earlier this year confirms directly: the clubhouse's interior has needed reconstruction for a while, and rebuilding it has been treated as a priority without a clear public timeline attached.
What The City Actually Signed Off On In January
On January 15, 2026, the Los Angeles Board of Recreation and Park Commissioners approved a new food and beverage concession for the Rancho Park clubhouse, and the details answer a question a lot of regulars have been asking for a while: who is actually going to run this place, and what will it be.
The winning operator is Victory Snacks, Inc., the same company that already runs the golf café at Penmar Golf Course in Venice. According to the board's own report, Victory Snacks took over that concession in 2019 as an underperforming café in need of a full turnaround, then kept it running through the shutdowns of 2020. That Venice track record was part of what set their proposal apart from the other bidders.
The concept has a name: The Rancho. The proposal describes a restaurant and bar built to "embrace its historic California mission-style ranch roots" with food cooked in an "open kitchen over live flames." The stated ambition, in the operator's own words from the filing, is direct:
We want to be THE neighborhood country club that doesn't require a membership fee.
The city's estimate puts its take at roughly $6.9 million over the ten-year concession term, with no cost to the Recreation and Parks general fund. Here's what's confirmed so far:
| Detail | What The City Approved |
|---|---|
| Operator | Victory Snacks, Inc., which also runs Penmar Golf Café in Venice |
| Concept name | The Rancho |
| Design direction | California mission-style ranch revival, open kitchen over live flames |
| City's estimated take | About $6.9 million over the 10-year term |
| Opening date | Not yet announced |
No build-out timeline or opening date has been made public. What changed is that the contract is signed, the concept is named, and the operator has already proven they can run a golf café through a genuine crisis. That is a meaningfully different position than the neighborhood has been in for years.
The Rest Of The Park Kept Moving Without It
The clubhouse being empty never stopped the rest of Cheviot Hills Park from functioning. The seasonal outdoor pool is running now, with a summer 2026 brochure updated as recently as August 4, just days before this was written. The rec center's 2026 spring camp flyer for youth sports notes the programming is made possible in part by the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games, a detail that ties a neighborhood day camp directly to the city's 2028 preparations. Tennis courts and an archery range also operate at the park, run as departments independent of the recreation center itself. None of that depended on the clubhouse being open.
Residents who want a say in what comes next have a built-in channel. The park's Advisory Board is made up of volunteer community members who meet quarterly to discuss park events, potential upgrades and ongoing projects, a fairly direct route for input if the clubhouse build-out becomes a topic locals want addressed publicly.
Two Sides Of Pico Boulevard, Still Not Talking
Cross Pico Boulevard from the park entrance and you land in the middle of a food scene that has run entirely independent of anything happening at the clubhouse. John O'Groats has served breakfast and lunch on this stretch of Pico since 1982, when Angelica and Robert Jacoby opened it at Manning Avenue and Pico Boulevard before moving to its current address at 10516 West Pico Boulevard. The restaurant is still family-owned, still serves the same Biscuits From Heaven that built its name, and is open daily from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.
A few doors down at 10509 West Pico Boulevard, Ludivine Paris has built its own following on croissants, canelés and lunch tartines, open Tuesday through Sunday with hours that run until 5 p.m. on weekdays and 3 p.m. on weekends. The two spots sit close enough to treat as one stop, and plenty of regulars do exactly that after a morning at the park. But that walk has always been a choice between two separate crowds, not a stop on one shared loop, because there has been nowhere at the park itself for either crowd to land first.
That is the part The Rancho actually changes, at least on paper. A working bar and restaurant inside the clubhouse gives golfers finishing a round and dog park regulars finishing a walk a reason to stay on the park side of Pico instead of splitting off toward breakfast the moment they're done. It does not replace John O'Groats or Ludivine Paris. It gives the neighborhood a third anchor that connects to both, something Cheviot Hills has not had in years.
Whether that plays out as smoothly as the January filing suggests remains to be seen, and the city has not committed to a date. But the pieces are in place in a way they weren't a year ago: a named operator with a working track record in Venice, a concept with a real design direction, and a revenue structure the city has already signed off on.
For a neighborhood that has quietly adapted around a half-finished building for years, that is worth paying attention to, even if you have no plans to move.
Zack Grakal and the BGG team keep an eye on details like this because they shape what it actually feels like to live in Cheviot Hills day to day, not just what a listing photo shows. If you are curious what your home in this stretch of the Westside is worth while all of this plays out, Get Your Instant Home Valuation.
