Walk south on Catalina Avenue this month and you'll pass two addresses that changed hands in 2026. One used to be Gabi James, the Spanish-French restaurant that closed in late April after eight years. The other was a liquor store nobody thought twice about. Both are now full restaurants with waitlists, and neither one belongs to someone new to the South Bay.
That's the part worth sitting with. When a beach commercial district turns over its restaurant lineup, the easy assumption is that outside money found a cheap corner and moved in. That's not what happened here. The people behind both openings already had a business a few blocks away. Riviera Village didn't get discovered this year. It got chosen, by operators who'd been watching it from Hermosa Beach and from a music festival stage, and who decided this particular stretch of Catalina Avenue was worth the move.
Same Address, Different Kitchen
Martha's has been serving breakfast in Hermosa Beach since 1984, on the corner of Hermosa Avenue and 22nd Street. It's the kind of place where the champagne brunch and the Breakfast Burrito are treated as civic institutions. This year, the ownership group that took over Martha's about a decade ago decided the brand was ready to grow, and they picked the space at 1810 S. Catalina Ave that Gabi James had occupied for eight years before closing in late April.
The new Martha's Redondo Beach is a two-story, 5,000-square-foot build, with the upstairs space dedicated to private dining and events for 80 to 100 guests, something the Hermosa location never had room for. The team hired Johnny De Vivo, who previously worked as executive chef at Rolling Hills Country Club, to run the kitchen. It's open daily, breakfast from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. and dinner from 5 to 9 p.m., wedged between Fringe and Redondo Beach Brew.
Co-owner Hilary Condren explained the move to a local restaurant outlet in terms that had nothing to do with rent being cheaper or the neighborhood being undiscovered.
"Redondo has a vibrant village. Their downtown, their heartbeat is on fire."
That's a business owner who already runs a restaurant fifteen minutes away describing the Village as a place with momentum he wanted in on, not a gap in the market he was filling.
A Liquor Store Remembers The Admiral Risty
The second flip is stranger and more personal. BeachLife Grotto opened this year in a space that used to be a liquor store, a few doors down at 1711 S. Catalina. The restaurant comes from Allen Sanford, co-founder of the BeachLife Festival, working with architect Miles Pritzkat, whose own office sits in Riviera Village.
Sanford didn't design this place around a trend. He designed it around memory. The building is explicitly modeled on two restaurants that no longer exist: the Admiral Risty in Palos Verdes and Millie Riera's Seafood Grotto, a spot at Avenue I and the Esplanade that Sanford used to visit as a kid. The old liquor store's walls stayed. Its slanted roof came off, replaced with a two-story white wood structure and an open-beam deck upstairs. Downstairs, alongside the seafood menu, there's a small retail counter selling beach gear and snacks, described as a general store built to fit Redondo Beach's culture.
That's two openings in one summer, both run by people who already had a stake in the South Bay before they signed a lease in the Village. Neither one is a stranger testing whether the neighborhood has legs.
The Decision Nobody Put A Sign On
Here's the part that explains the timing. Most beach cities in Los Angeles County spent the past couple of years quietly dismantling the outdoor dining decks and parklets that went up during the pandemic. Redondo Beach didn't. The city council voted this year to extend the outdoor dining deck program in Riviera Village for five more years.
Condren pointed to that decision directly when explaining why Martha's chose to expand into the Village rather than somewhere else. A five-year commitment to outdoor seating is a different signal than a temporary permit that could disappear next budget cycle. It tells an operator planning a two-story build with an upstairs event space that the sidewalk seating downstairs isn't going anywhere either. Nobody put a headline on that vote. It's the kind of municipal decision that shows up in council minutes and nowhere else, but it's the reason two restaurant operators felt confident enough to commit real capital to Catalina Avenue this year.
What Didn't Move
The turnover is real, but it's not total. Riviera House, the seafood-forward restaurant and craft cocktail bar at 1708 S. Catalina, has been open since 2019 and isn't going anywhere. Salt & Pearl, Turquoise, Il Posto, The Hook & Plow, and The Craftsman still anchor the stretch of Catalina that locals rank highest on Yelp. Vida Modern Mexican + Tequila is still pouring. The Farmers Market still runs weekly, and the Riviera Village Association still hosts its Sidewalk Sale on August 22 and 23 this year, the same two days it's run for as long as most residents can remember.
That stability matters as much as the openings do. A district that swapped every tenant would be a different kind of story, one about displacement or a landlord clearing house. This is narrower than that. Two specific corners changed hands, both to operators who already had South Bay roots, while the rest of the block held steady. That's what a healthy commercial strip actually looks like when it's absorbing new investment instead of being remade by it.
What This Means If You're Already Here
If you live within walking distance of Catalina Avenue, the practical update is simple. Martha's now does dinner, not just the brunch you already knew from Hermosa Beach, and the private dining room upstairs is worth knowing about if you've got a family event coming up. BeachLife Grotto is worth trying specifically because it's trying to recreate two restaurants that are gone, which means the menu and the room are doing something more considered than a typical new opening. And if you haven't been to the Village in a few weeks, the Sidewalk Sale on August 22 and 23 is a good excuse to see both new spots and the old anchors in the same afternoon.
The broader read is this. When a neighborhood's restaurant scene turns over and every new name traces back to someone who already worked in the area, that's a sign the place is being reinvested in by people who understand it, not repositioned by people trying to guess what it wants to become. Riviera Village spent this year proving that the operators who know the South Bay best keep choosing this particular four-block stretch of Catalina Avenue over anywhere else they could have gone.
If you're weighing a move to this stretch of Redondo Beach and want a read on how a block like this holds its character while it grows, that's exactly the kind of local detail worth a conversation before you start touring. Marie Morgenstern works this market block by block. Let's Connect.
