If you live in South Redondo and you have watched the Village settle into a steady rhythm over the last few years, this summer is the moment it shifts again. Not because of any single opening. Because of a decision the City Council made this spring that most other South Bay cities went the other way on, and a handful of operators who read that decision correctly and moved.
The short version is that the Village is now the only walkable dining core between Manhattan Beach and Palos Verdes where the pandemic outdoor rooms are staying, on paper, for another half decade. Everything else on this list follows from that.
The Gabi James Space Has a Successor, and It's a Familiar One
The block between Avenue I and Avenida del Norte is losing one of its longest-running dinner rooms and picking up a name most Hermosa regulars already know. Martha's is taking 1810 S. Catalina Ave., the space that housed Spanish-French restaurant Gabi James until it closed in late April after an eight-year run.
The move is not a first-time operator taking a swing. Co-owner Hilary Condren and his team have owned Martha's, which opened in Hermosa Beach in 1984, for about a decade. The Redondo location will occupy a 5,000-square-foot building split across two floors, nestled between Fringe and Redondo Beach Brew. Johnny De Vivo, formerly the executive chef at Rolling Hills Country Club, has been tapped as executive chef for the brand.
The upstairs floor is the part worth noting if you have ever tried to book a rehearsal dinner or a milestone birthday inside the Village and come up short. The Martha's team has long been seeking a way to incorporate private events into regular offerings, and the upstairs space was a major selling point. That is a piece of the Village's inventory that has been genuinely thin.
"Redondo has a vibrant village. Their downtown, their heartbeat is on fire," Condren told What Now Los Angeles when the deal was announced.
That is a Hermosa operator saying so about Redondo, not the other way around. Worth sitting with for a second.
The Policy Decision Behind All of It
Here is the piece most residents did not see, because it happened at a council meeting rather than on a marquee. While other beach cities have largely removed the temporary outdoor dining spaces put in place during the pandemic, the Redondo Beach City Council decided this spring to extend the outdoor dining deck program in the Riviera Village for the next five years.
If you have wondered why walking Catalina Avenue on a Friday evening feels denser and more Continental than it did in 2019, that is why. The decks are the whole game. They doubled the effective seat count of half the block, they turned a two-lane commercial street into something closer to a European paseo, and now they have a five-year runway instead of a rolling six-month extension.
That is the timeline an operator like Martha's needs to sign a lease and fit out a 5,000-square-foot space with a private-event floor. Condren has said the deck program is part of what keeps the Riviera an energetic community ideal for a new opening. Read the sequence in that order and the summer makes more sense: the council voted, then the deal closed.
The parklet arrangement itself is not new. City leaders and staff worked with the Riviera Village Association in 2020 to design outdoor dining spaces in what had been parking spots, and the parklets injected so much life into the Village that the mayor, council, and RVA began working to make the arrangement permanent well before the original December 2021 sunset. What changed this year is that the timeline finally got long enough to be planned around.
BeachLife Grotto Is the Other Anchor You May Not Have Registered Yet
A little further up Catalina, the other new operator on the block is a project that came out of the festival two blocks away at Seaside Lagoon. BeachLife Grotto is a two-story restaurant, retail, and bar concept from BeachLife Festival co-founder Allen Sanford and partners, built into a former Riviera Village liquor store.
Architect Miles Pritzkat, whose office is also in Riviera Village, designed the two-story white wood building with open beams on the top-floor deck; the liquor store's walls were kept and its slanted roof torn out. That is an adaptive reuse story that reads very differently from the usual South Bay pattern of scraping a lot and building spec.
The retail piece is the part that quietly changes what the Village is on a weekday afternoon. Inside the restaurant is a retail store selling packaged snacks, retro bluetooth speakers, and retro pickleball paddles, described by Sanford as a "BeachLife version of a general store." A restaurant that also functions as a small dry-goods stop is a different kind of daytime anchor than a dinner-only room.
A Third Anchor at the North End of the Same Walk
If you draw a line from the south end of the Village up to the pier, the north bookend of that walk has been dormant for a long time. That changes this summer.
The Redondo Beach Historic Library at 309 Esplanade served as the city's library from July 1930 to July 1991 before being turned into an events building. Its architecture and location put it on the National Register of Historic Places in May 1981; the historic library closed in July 1991 after sixty years as the city's main library, was internally remodeled, and reopened in 1996 for special events. After sitting mostly quiet for a stretch, it is reopening again.
In 2025 the operation of the Redondo Beach Historic Library went to MBM Hospitality and Made by Meg Catering for renovations and a grand reopening for private events. The Easy Reader reported that after three years in the making, the City of Redondo Beach officially approved Made by Meg to restore and reopen the building, complete with a new public café, community art exhibits, and private event spaces by the sea.
The public café is the detail worth watching for residents. A private-event venue is closed to you 350 days a year. A café that fronts Veterans Park with an ocean view is something you can walk to on a Tuesday morning.
A note on the address, because this trips up almost everyone: the event venue at 309 Esplanade is not the same as the active Redondo Beach Public Library on Pacific Coast Highway. Different building, different function, same name on the front.
The Walk, End to End
If you have out-of-town guests this summer and you want to string it together on foot, the sequence is doing more than it used to:
- Start at the Historic Library and the Veterans Park lawn at the north edge.
- Cross into the pier for a beer or the Summer of Music concert if it is a Thursday or Saturday evening.
- Walk south down the Esplanade toward the Village along the bluff, roughly a mile.
- Cut inland at Avenue I into the deck-covered stretch of Catalina.
- Dinner at Martha's, a drink at BeachLife Grotto, or a stop at Redondo Beach Brew, then loop back.
That is a Village-to-pier walk that did not really exist as a single continuous experience five years ago. It does now.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
A few things worth holding onto as a resident, none of which show up in the usual "best of Riviera Village" roundups.
The deck program is the reason your favorite table exists. If a five-year extension sounds procedural, remember that other South Bay cities took the parklets out. Redondo did not. That is why the block has kept the density it has, and why national and multi-city operators are now paying attention. The Martha's team is eyeing three additional locations in the next three years along the coast between Santa Barbara and San Diego, and they chose the Village as the first move outside Hermosa. Read that as a leading indicator, not a lagging one.
The rest of the summer is unusually stacked. The 2026 Riviera Village Summer Festival ran Friday June 26 through Sunday June 28, with over 150 exhibitors, an ocean-view beer and wine garden, live entertainment, and international food trucks. The pier concert series runs deep into September, with Saturday August 1 (Manuel the Band, indie pop), Thursday August 6 (Hot Lava, a B-52s tribute), Saturday August 8 (Alarmaz, reggae), Thursday August 20 (Supersonic-LA, an Oasis tribute), and Saturday August 22 (CC Stugino, blues rock) among the dates worth putting on a calendar. The Village's own "Meet me in the Village" weekend is set for August 22 and 23.
The private-event picture is different now. Between Martha's upstairs floor and the Historic Library at the north end, the Village has two new options for a rehearsal dinner or a fiftieth birthday that residents did not have last summer. That is a real change to the inventory, not a cosmetic one.
The block is denser without being louder. The deck extension does not add new buildings. It just keeps the seat count where residents got used to it during 2021 and 2022. If you live in the Hollywood Riviera or on the south end of the Esplanade and you have been debating whether the Village has stopped feeling like a small town, the honest answer is that the streetscape you like is now protected policy through 2031.
There is a version of this post that reads like a restaurant roundup. This is not that. The move underneath all of it is a single vote that kept the outdoor rooms alive, and everything visible on Catalina right now is a response to that vote.
If you would like to talk through what any of this means for a home you already own in South Redondo, or you are quietly wondering whether now is the moment to make a move within the neighborhood, California Collective is glad to book a curated neighborhood consultation and walk it with you.