Manhattan Beach This August: What The AVP Closures Actually Cover, And Where Locals Are Already Eating

The Manhattan Beach Open plays for three days. The street closures around it run for ten, and they started today.

If you live anywhere near the Strand, you already noticed the barricades going up on Manhattan Beach Boulevard this morning. That's not a scheduling error. The City of Manhattan Beach's own event page confirms the Walk of Fame Ceremony kicks off the tournament on August 13 at 3:30 p.m. at the Pier, with competition running August 14 through 16. The closures wrapped around that window are a different, longer story, and knowing exactly where they fall is the difference between a normal week downtown and one where you're circling for parking on Highland.

Ten Days Of Barricades For Three Days Of Volleyball

Here's what's actually shut down, and when, according to the city's official closure map:

Notice the gap between columns one and two. The full ten-day closure only touches the blocks of MBB closest to the sand. Everything east of Ocean Drive, and every street that isn't MBB itself, operates on a normal August schedule the entire time. There's no dedicated event parking this year, but the city is running a free shuttle from Pacific Elementary School at 1200 Pacific Avenue, which is the move if you're headed to the Pier for the matches themselves.

The tournament is free general admission, first come first served, which means the crowd density near the Pier will be real on the 14th, 15th, and 16th. It also means the other seven days of restricted access exist for setup and teardown, not for volleyball. If your read on August was "downtown is a write-off," that's only true for a few blocks, and only fully true for three of the ten days.

The Restaurants Betting You'll Show Up On A Random Tuesday

What's more interesting than the closures is what opened around them, because none of it was timed to the tournament.

Coucou landed at 1131 Manhattan Avenue this summer, a block from the Pier in the space that used to be Nando Trattoria. It's the third location for owners Jesse and Hayley Feldman, following Venice in 2023 and West Hollywood in 2024, and the kitchen is run by Jacob Wetherington, a Bouchon alum. The bistro leans into a daily Apero Hour, French aperitif culture built around early-evening drinks and small plates rather than a full dinner commitment. Feldman told a reporter covering the opening that "we watched so many of our guests start over here with incredible resilience" after the Palisades fires, which is a specific enough reason for a Venice and West Hollywood brand to bet a third location on this particular stretch of Manhattan Avenue.

A few doors down, Bread Head took over the old Tacolicious space, also on Manhattan Avenue, building its menu around focaccia sandwiches. Both of these sit inside the closure footprint, which means the smart week to try either one is not this coming weekend.

East of downtown, two openings sidestep the tournament entirely. Saint & Second, a modern American restaurant from Hofman Hospitality Group, opened its first South Bay location on July 21 at Manhattan Village, 3160 N Sepulveda Blvd, joining the company's existing Long Beach and Topanga spots. And Great White, the all-day café that first opened in Venice Beach in 2017 and is known for grain bowls and fish tacos, has moved into the former Pitfire Pizza space at Metlox, giving that courtyard a daytime tenant it's needed for a while.

Neither location touches the AVP closure zone. Neither restaurant scheduled its opening around volleyball season. What they did instead was bet on the Sepulveda corridor and the Highland-adjacent Metlox courtyard as places locals already go on an ordinary Tuesday, tournament or not.

What The Timing Actually Tells You

Put the two stories next to each other and the pattern is clearer than either one alone. A tournament that's run every summer since 1960 pulls a free, first-come crowd into a few blocks around the Pier for ten days. At the same time, four new restaurants opened this summer, and the ones that are brand-new to the South Bay, Coucou and the Metlox café among them, picked addresses on either side of that footprint rather than timing anything to the schedule. Coucou and Bread Head are betting on the Pier-adjacent identity even during the disruption. Saint & Second and the Metlox café are betting on the version of Manhattan Beach that exists on the other 355 days of the year, when nobody's routing around a street closure map.

That's not a coincidence you'd notice from a satellite view of the town. It's the kind of read you only get from knowing which blocks are actually affected and which restaurants specifically chose to open outside them this summer.

The Concerts Keep Going Either Way

None of this touches Polliwog Park, which is running its own calendar completely independent of the Pier. Concerts in the Park continues every Sunday from 5 to 7 p.m. through Labor Day weekend, free and sponsored by Chevron through Manhattan Beach Parks and Recreation. The remaining 2026 lineup:

• August 16: Gypsy Dreams
• August 23: The Police Academy
• August 30: Stone Soul
• September 6: ABBA LA

Bring a low chair rather than a high-backed one, since the amphitheater seating is first come and sightlines matter more once the lawn fills in. Pets stay home for this one, per the park's posted rules. If the Pier feels like too much this month, Polliwog is the other half of Manhattan Beach's August, and it doesn't care what's happening ten blocks south.

The Short Version

The tournament is three days. The closures are ten. The new restaurants split down the middle, half betting on the crowd and half betting on the calendar underneath it. Knowing which is which is the difference between a frustrating week and a good one.

If you're already living this stretch of the South Bay and want a sense of how any of it, from the Metlox lease-up to the Sepulveda corridor's momentum, might eventually matter for your own street, May-Ann Fisher tracks Manhattan Beach block by block, not just at listing time. Book a consultation whenever the question moves from "what's new" to "what's next."