Late Summer On The Westside: What's Actually Opened In Santa Monica And What's Next On The Pier

The clearest sign that Santa Monica's tenant mix is shifting is not a headline opening. It's the small stuff. Montana Avenue quietly swapped a coffee shop for a smashburger counter. Main Street traded a donut window for dipped ice cream. A 6,500 square foot all-day cafe is going into an office park. Read those substitutions side by side and a pattern shows up: each corridor is placing a different bet on what people who already live here want to walk to on a Tuesday.

This is a locals' read on that pattern. Where the new places are, what they replaced, and which nights on the calendar are worth blocking off between now and Día de los Muertos.

Montana Avenue picks a lane

The most talked-about swap of the year happened at 930 Montana. The Win~Dow drew crowds around the block when it opened its Santa Monica location at 930 Montana Ave., taking over a space previously occupied by the Go Get Em Tiger coffee shop. The Santa Monica location is the seventh for the brand, joining The Grove, Hollywood, Long Beach, Venice, Silver Lake and Santa Barbara, and opened in mid-March. The tell here is the swap itself: a slow-morning third-wave cafe replaced by a fast, sub-$5 burger walk-up. Montana is being reprogrammed around counters, not tables.

The next piece lands a few blocks north. A second Santa Monica location of Italian gelato brand Bacio di Latte is coming to 1510 Montana Ave., next to Italian market Sogno Toscano. Two dessert-adjacent counters within walking distance of each other on the same avenue is not a coincidence. It's a corridor choosing grab-and-go over sit-down.

The Promenade gets less precious on purpose

Downtown's story is the opposite. The Third Street Promenade has been trying to rebuild foot traffic for three years, and the tenants filling in are unapologetically mainstream. Santa Monica welcomed two new restaurant openings in as many days in June, with Raising Cane's Chicken Fingers cutting the ribbon on the Third Street Promenade and The Win~Dow burger concept debuting at 930 Montana Ave., adding more than 100 jobs and fresh dining energy to a city working to revitalize its economic core. Mayor Torosis noted that the timing aligned with a broader burst of civic activity downtown, including a newly opened FIFA store, World Cup festivities and Pride on the Promenade events.

There's more coming. Gott's will open in Downtown Santa Monica later this summer, best known for burgers topped with things like green chile, griddled mushrooms, or kimchi, plus a full menu of garlic fries, cobb salads, hot dogs, and shakes. If Montana is betting on refined counters, downtown is betting on volume and name recognition. Both bets can be right.

Wilshire, 15th, and a Vietnamese coffee arrival

The block behind downtown is where the more interesting cafe geography is forming. A new coffee shop called Sonia's Café is working to open at 1260 15th St. at the corner of Arizona Avenue. Along Wilshire, the vacant corner building at 1231 Wilshire Blvd. will soon host Vietnamese coffee specialists DOL Coffee House, which currently has a location in Gardena where it also serves boba and desserts. A Vietnamese cafe on Wilshire is a genuinely new note for this stretch. If you live west of 20th, you now have a walkable morning option that didn't exist a year ago.

Main Street swaps sugar for sugar

If you walk Main a lot, you already noticed the closure at 2441. The closure of Holey Grail Donuts at 2441 Main St. has made way for a new dessert concept. A notice on the door indicates La Diperie will be moving in. The Montreal chain, founded in 2014, specializes in dipped ice cream, cakes, donuts and cookies served with a selection of chocolate dips and more than 20 toppings. With more than 65 locations across Canada and into Florida, the Santa Monica outpost would mark the brand's first West Coast location. The Main Street pattern in one sentence: one dessert concept out, a bigger dessert concept in, and Santa Monica becomes the West Coast debut city.

A quick read of the corridor rewrites happening this year:

Colorado Center and the office-park cafe experiment

The most ambitious opening of the year is not on a retail corridor at all. A surf-inspired, all-day restaurant and community hub is set to open this summer at Colorado Center, joining a wave of new cafes and casual eateries taking shape across Santa Monica. Bower Santa Monica, spanning approximately 6,500 square feet, will offer food and beverage, health and wellness programming and what its creators describe as "socialization rituals" at the 15-acre office campus. BXP announced the concept April 15 alongside restaurateur Dave Harper and New School Hospitality. Harper, the founding partner of Amigo Roasters and the restaurateur behind Bondi Harvest, Palmys and Likeminded Wellness Club, said the restaurant draws its name from Fairy Bower, a break in the Cabbage Tree Bay of Manly Beach in Australia. If it works, expect other Westside office parks to try the same playbook.

The chefs who already made their name are opening smaller

Two openings on Santa Monica Boulevard reward locals who followed these teams elsewhere. Holy Basil Santa Monica at 2828 Santa Monica Blvd. is bright, busy and boisterous, with communal tables and little separation between the dining room and open kitchen where flames from the wok fly high every few minutes. The ever-evolving menu highlights what's fresh, sustainable and in season. Then there is Jade Rabbit. A fast-casual Chinese American restaurant in Santa Monica from Bryant Ng and Kim Luu-Ng, the couple behind now-closed Cassia. For Ng, Jade Rabbit represents a culinary homecoming: both his parents and grandparents operated Chinese restaurants in the L.A. area. After decades of upscale cooking, the chef is bringing it all back. Combos start at $13, with upgrades for premium proteins like garlic chili shrimp, a lomo saltado-inspired beef and broccoli, and Sichuan-flavored spicy minced lamb. Two fine dining alumni running fast-casual counters within a mile of each other says something about where the chef economy is heading on the Westside.

One more addition for the sushi crowd: Rolld in Santa Monica is the first place to do handrolls Australian-style, selling pre-made temaki from a deli case, with five to six roll options daily in white or brown rice, packed in teal boxes with fish-shaped soy sauce bottles.

The Pier is now a scheduled venue, not a walk-up

The bigger story for anyone who lives within walking distance of Ocean Avenue is that the Pier stopped being a passive destination and started acting like a scheduled venue. Last December the city approved a slate of ticketed and free activations that will run through 2028.

Here is the calendar worth knowing:

• The inaugural Santa Monica International Jazz Festival featuring Kamasi Washington kicked off the season, and FIFA World Cup action is playing at the Michelob ULTRA Pitchside Club on the Pier.
• Pier 360 Beach Festival returned June 27 and 28 with ocean sports, live music and food. The annual Fourth of July Parade returned to Main Street, along with a new Fourth of July event produced by Revel Republic, marking America's 250th birthday and the 100th anniversary of Route 66.
• Santa Monica's State of the City event returned July 23 at Ocean Park Branch Library and Main Street, with live entertainment, kids' activities, food, drinks and community programming.
• The summer lineup continues into September, when Goldenvoice is expected to bring a two-day ticketed music festival to the beach, with additional free music, culture and community events expected to be announced ahead of the festival.
• In September, the legendary S.S. Rex returns, the infamous 1930s gambling ship that once anchored off the pier, recreated inside the historic Merry-Go-Round building for the second annual benefit gala supporting the Pier's free community programming as a 501(c)3 nonprofit.
• On November 1, the Pier hosts Día de los Muertos with art installations, live performances, community altars, mariachi, ballet folklorico, and a procession.

The Goldenvoice piece is the one to watch. The city is partnering with Goldenvoice, a division of AEG Presents, to produce a new music and cultural festival on the coastline in fall 2026, with an inaugural single-day concept estimated at 30,000 to 35,000 attendees. The concert would return in fall 2027 and fall 2028 as an annual event. For homeowners near Ocean Park and the pier-adjacent blocks, that is a permanent addition to the fall calendar, with the parking and street-closure implications that come with it.

Locals' Night is the sleeper answer

If ticketed festivals are not your speed, the recurring free program is genuinely made for the people who live here. Every third Thursday from September through May, the Pier rolls out a curated series for locals, by locals, with youth activities, a car show, local DJs and live music from local bands, art exhibits and more. Mark the third Thursday of September on your calendar. It is the least crowded good night of the month on the Pier.

What this changes for a Thursday evening

Read together, the openings and the calendar tell the same story from two directions. Santa Monica is investing in structured reasons to be outside, and it is filling the storefronts around those reasons with counter-service concepts that reward walking. If you live here, the practical output is that a Thursday between Labor Day and Halloween now has more programmed and unprogrammed options within a mile of the water than it did in 2024.

Grab a Jade Rabbit combo before Locals' Night. Walk Bacio di Latte after a Pier 360 recap dinner. Skip the parking hunt for the Goldenvoice weekend and stay on foot.

If you are thinking about what any of this activity means for the value of your home or a future move within Santa Monica, May-Ann Fisher tracks these corridor-level shifts closely and would be glad to talk through it. Book a consultation when you are ready.