The Abbot Kinney Festival Returns September 27. Here's What Grew While It Was Gone.

For two Septembers in a row, the last Sunday of the month came and went on Abbot Kinney without the thing that has defined the street for forty years. No stages. No 300 vendor booths lining both sides of the block. No crowd stretching shoulder to shoulder along the full mile between Venice Boulevard and Main Street. The Abbot Kinney Festival, the boulevard's biggest annual gathering since 1984, was called off in 2024 and again in 2025 after organizers cited a sponsorship slowdown hitting festivals nationwide. This year it's back, on Sunday, September 27, running its usual 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., marking the 40th edition of an event that had never before gone dark two years running outside the pandemic.

If your read on that headline is relief, that Abbot Kinney finally gets its centerpiece back, you're missing the more interesting story. The street didn't sit still for two years waiting to be rescued by a block party. It kept building without one. What actually opened, reopened, and broke ground along that mile between 2024 and now tells you more about what walking Abbot Kinney feels like this fall than the festival date does.

The Festival's Absence Wasn't a Pause. It Was a Test.

Before the hiatus, the Abbot Kinney Festival pulled in an estimated 120,000 visitors, 300 artisan vendors, four live music stages, and three beer gardens across its route. That's not a neighborhood picnic. It's the kind of single-day draw that can make a commercial strip feel like it depends on one Sunday to justify the other 364 days. Patti Reiss, the Abbot Kinney Festival Association's president, has framed this year's comeback as meaningful for the neighbors and businesses who watched the corridor change without it. She's right that it's meaningful. She's also describing a boulevard that didn't wait around to find out if the festival would come back before deciding what it wanted to be.

Since 1984, the festival's nonprofit arm has put more than $300,000 into local youth and arts programs, which is worth knowing if you're wondering whether Sunday's event is just a street fair with a name attached. It funds real things. But the fact that it can disappear for two years over a sponsorship gap, and the street keeps functioning, is itself information. Abbot Kinney's daily life was never as dependent on that one Sunday as the marketing suggested.

The Restaurants Came Back First, and Loudest

Restaurants are always the fastest read on a commercial strip's health, and Abbot Kinney's dinner scene didn't just recover during the hiatus. It restructured.

Tasting Kitchen, the farm-to-table Italian spot that helped kick off the boulevard's restaurant renaissance back in 2009, closed in 2023 after a fire. It reopened this past summer at 1633 Abbot Kinney with founding chef Casey Lane back in the kitchen, running a dual format of tasting menu and à la carte, and moved to a full seven-day schedule with late-night hours running until 1 a.m. as of August. A few doors down, RVR opened as chef Travis Lett's return to the same address where he once ran MTN, five years after he left the Gjelina kitchen just down the block. It's already the kind of reservation you book weeks out.

San Damián opened in June at 1025 Abbot Kinney under Enrique Olvera's Casamata hospitality group, with chef Chuy Cervantes running a Pacific Coast seafood menu built on ceviches and aguachiles. Badmaash, the modern Indian restaurant group founded in 2013 by brothers Nakul and Arjun Mahendro, planted its third location at 1616 Abbot Kinney. Westside Oyster Club moved into the old Blue Plate Oysterette space with a Cape Cod-style raw bar from the team behind The Albright on Santa Monica Pier. Down near the boardwalk, right under the Venice sign, a walk-up window called Meadow started serving Greek frozen yogurt in two flavors to the boardwalk crowd.

That's five restaurant openings or reopenings in a two-year window when the neighborhood's marquee event didn't exist. Nobody was waiting for permission.

The Furniture Showroom Is the Detail That Actually Matters

Here's the part the restaurant coverage tends to skip. In April, a Canadian furniture company called Cozey opened a roughly 5,000-square-foot pop-up showroom at 1220 Abbot Kinney, stocked with modular sofas, rugs, and outdoor furniture. The company has said Los Angeles is now one of its largest U.S. markets since entering the country in 2023, and the space is booked through December. A few blocks over, Bodega + Palms took over the longtime Mitchell's Market space, mixing sunscreen and dog treats with breakfast burritos, focaccia sandwiches from Jennie's House, pastries from Hasi Bread, and frozen pizzas from Fiorelli Pizzas.

Neither of those is a restaurant, and that's the point. A couch, a bottle of sunscreen, and a breakfast burrito aren't things a tourist itinerary is built around. They're things a resident buys on a random Tuesday. For most of the 2010s, the running joke about Abbot Kinney was that half the storefronts seemed permanently under renovation. What filled in during the festival's absence wasn't more of the same photogenic retail. It was the kind of store you actually use.

Over on Washington Boulevard, a few blocks from the boulevard proper, ¡Salud! opened at 417 Washington Blvd in late January, running a split shift of specialty coffee and Latin-inspired breakfast by day, then mezcal cocktails and tapas after dark. It held its ribbon-cutting with the Venice Chamber of Commerce on January 24, and about 100 locals turned out for the chamber mixer that followed in early March. That's a small number in absolute terms. In context, it's a brand-new operator choosing to plug into existing neighborhood infrastructure within weeks of opening, rather than treating the chamber as an afterthought and hoping the boulevard's reputation would do the marketing instead.

Two Hotels Are Turning a Daytime Street Into an Overnight One

The change most residents haven't clocked yet is happening at both ends of the boulevard at once. Venice Place, a 78-room hotel designed by local architect David Hertz, is under construction at the northern end, anchored by Felix Trattoria, which Esquire named the best new restaurant in America when it opened in 2017 and which earned a James Beard Award finalist nomination in 2018. The design preserves the existing restaurant frontage on Abbot Kinney while adding a landscaped courtyard with multiple pedestrian entry points. At the southern end, near the corner of Abbot Kinney and Main Street, 881 Abbot Kinney is a 43-room project. Both were slated for completion somewhere in the 2025 to 2026 window, according to a corridor review published by FashionNetwork in December 2024.

Abbot Kinney has functioned for the better part of a decade as a street with almost no overnight capacity. That's about to change, and it matters beyond the buildings themselves. Reservation-driven rooms like RVR pull diners from across the Westside to fill their tables on any given night. Overnight hotel guests sustain that kind of dinner density in a way day-trippers who drive home after dessert simply don't. Add a furniture showroom booked through December and a corner store selling breakfast burritos, and you get a boulevard that's quietly stopped behaving like a strip you visit for one meal and leave.

What September 27 Actually Homecomes To

The festival's return is still worth marking on your calendar. It's free, it runs the full mile between Venice Boulevard and Main Street, and organizers are pushing bike and carpool logistics this year, with free bike valet stations planned at both ends of the route and a 21-and-over VIP garden section available for a $40 donation. If you're driving, plan to park early or skip the car altogether.

But the more useful thing to understand walking into September 27 is that you're not watching a street get restored to what it was in 2023. You're watching a homecoming to a corridor that spent two years building a different version of itself. Later this year, Truly Pizza, the Dana Point pizzeria known for its three-day fermented dough, is set to open its third location at 1239 Abbot Kinney, seating close to 130. Above the bar Only the Wild Ones, a speakeasy called Force of Nature has been quietly pouring wine and cocktails sourced from women in regenerative culinary practice, a project from Crudo e Nudo's Leena Culhane. Neither of those needed the festival's blessing to find an audience, and neither will need it to keep one.

Even off the boulevard, the neighborhood's calendar kept its own rhythm. 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, and it didn't need a street fair to draw a crowd either. First Fridays keep running the first Friday of every month from 5 to 9:30 p.m. with a rotating food truck lineup. The most recent one landed September 4; the next is October 2. The Venice Beach Farmers' Market keeps its weekly schedule going, and Artists & Fleas keeps its rotating roster of makers and vintage sellers on the boulevard through the week.

The street the festival is coming back to didn't need it to survive the last two years. What it built in the meantime, a returned chef, a furniture showroom booked solid, two hotels rising at either end, is the part worth walking the boulevard to see for yourself before the crowds show up on the 27th.

If you're weighing what any of this means for property on or near Abbot Kinney, or in Venice more broadly, The Malibu Life can walk you through it. Work With Us.