Walk into Tasting Kitchen on Abbot Kinney Boulevard this month and you'll see the same olive tree that has anchored the dining room since 2009, its branches still reaching over the same tables where Casey Lane first built his name. The restaurant closed after a fire in 2023. It reopened July 16 under Lane's direction, with the tree kept intact through the rebuild and a beverage program now run by Blake Antrobus, who most recently worked at Monsieur Dior by Dominique Crenn. Lane still oversees the kitchens at Ghisallo and Jyan Isaac Bread, but Tasting Kitchen is where he started, and it's where he chose to come back.
That detail matters more than it looks. If you've lived here through a few cycles of storefront turnover, you've probably absorbed the assumption that Abbot Kinney's newness means outside money moving in and local character moving out. The current wave of activity on the boulevard tells a different story. The names filling the gaps right now aren't strangers to the street. They're the same people who built its reputation the first time, coming back to the blocks where they started.
The Boomerang Pattern
Lane isn't the only one. A few blocks from Tasting Kitchen, chef Travis Lett spent years running the kitchen at Gjelina before stepping away for five years. He came back to Venice with RVR, an izakaya built on Japanese cooking methods paired with California ingredients, where dishes like chicken karaage and a Santa Barbara black cod keep regulars coming back. Reservations run weeks out. Both restaurants follow the same arc: a chef builds something on this street, leaves, and returns to open something new within walking distance of where they started.
| Chef | Original Venice run | Time away | Back now |
|---|---|---|---|
| Casey Lane | Tasting Kitchen, opened 2009 | Closed 2023 after a fire | Reopened July 16, 2026, same address, same olive tree |
| Travis Lett | Ran the Gjelina kitchen for years | Five-year hiatus | RVR, an izakaya a few blocks from Gjelina |
Neither chef needed Abbot Kinney. Both of them chose it anyway, twice.
A Split Shift on Washington
The pattern extends past the boulevard itself. On Washington Boulevard between Dell and Clune, a new spot called ¡Salud! opened at 417 Washington Blvd in late January 2026, holding its ribbon cutting with the Venice Chamber of Commerce on January 24. The concept runs two lives in one room: mornings bring specialty coffee and a Latin-inspired breakfast menu, evenings shift into mezcal cocktails and tapas after the lights come down. By early March 2026, roughly a hundred locals had turned out for a Chamber mixer there, which is a fast turnaround for any new business to become a fixture in neighborhood life.
What makes ¡Salud! worth noting isn't novelty. It's that a split-shift concept only works if there's enough foot traffic at both ends of the day to support it, morning commuters and dog walkers on one side, an evening crowd on the other. A business betting on that rhythm is a business betting that Venice residents, not just weekend visitors, are the ones keeping the lights on.
The Rest of the Room Filling In
Not every new arrival is a returning local, and that's fine. BADMAASH, the modern Indian restaurant founded in 2013 by brothers Nakul and Arjun Mahendro, opened its third location this year at 1616 Abbot Kinney Blvd, bringing a menu built around reimagined comfort dishes like neck korma and a tandoori chicken tikka poutine to the Westside. Later this year, Truly Pizza, the Orange County chain known for its three-day fermented dough, is set to open its third location on the boulevard. A chain opening a third location isn't a headline on its own, but it does confirm something: the operators calculating whether Abbot Kinney can support a serious kitchen are increasingly answering yes.
First Friday, As It Actually Happened
If you wanted proof that this is a street people show up to rather than just drive past, this past Friday delivered it. On August 7, the monthly Abbot Kinney First Friday ran its usual 5 to 9:30 p.m. window with a food truck lineup that included:
- Cousin's Maine Lobster
- Cali Craving
- The Musubi Box
- Aloha Fridays
- Sus Arepas
- Man Eating Plant
- Wise BBQ
The organizers, the nonprofit Abbot Kinney Boulevard Association, post the lineup ahead of each First Friday and ask visitors to leave the sidewalk tables for the brick-and-mortar restaurants' actual customers. That's a small operational detail, but it's the kind of rule that only exists because the event has grown large enough to need it.
The Festival Comes Back After a Pause
The bigger signal on the calendar is the Abbot Kinney Festival, set for Sunday, September 27. The festival is a 40-year Venice institution, and its Spirit of Venice Award has recognized community contributors since 1989, when the first honor went to descendants of Abbot Kinney himself, the man the street is named for. The event was paused in recent years, a casualty of the broader sponsorship slowdown affecting community festivals, as organizers explained at the time. Its return this September isn't being staged by the city or a developer. It's coming back because the volunteers who run it, longtime residents rather than outside promoters, decided the street was ready to carry it again.
That's the thread running through all of this. A chef closes his restaurant after a fire and reopens it in the same spot three years later. Another chef leaves the neighborhood's most talked-about kitchen and comes back five years later with something new a few doors down. A community festival goes quiet and returns because the people who built it in the first place still live here and still want it back. None of that is the story of a street being remade by people who don't know it. It's the story of a street being maintained by the people who already do.
If you live near Abbot Kinney, you already knew something was shifting. What the last few months make clear is the direction: not outward, toward whoever can afford the rent, but inward, back toward the people who built the block's reputation the first time around.
Want the kind of neighborhood read that goes beyond the restaurant lineup, whether you're curious about a specific block, a listing near the boulevard, or what's changing in the streets around you? Casty Living keeps a close eye on Venice and the rest of the Westside. Let's Chat!
