Why Riviera Village Restaurants in Redondo Beach Are Growing

"Redondo has a vibrant village. Their downtown, their heartbeat is on fire."

That's Hilary Condren, co-owner of Martha's, explaining why his family's 42-year-old Hermosa Beach restaurant picked Riviera Village for its first-ever expansion. It sounds like the kind of quote a restaurateur gives to any reporter about any neighborhood. It isn't. Condren was talking about a specific municipal decision, made this spring, that most of the beach cities around him have already walked back.

Here's the thing residents of Catalina Avenue may not have clocked yet: the outdoor parklets that have lined the sidewalks since the pandemic aren't a leftover emergency measure anymore. The Redondo Beach City Council voted this year to extend the Riviera Village outdoor dining deck program for five more years, building on a permitting process the city started in 2023 to make the decks permanent rather than renew them year to year. Meanwhile, other beach cities have largely removed the temporary outdoor dining spaces they built during COVID. Redondo didn't just keep its tables out. It committed to them, in writing, through the end of the decade.

That single policy choice is the reason a new restaurant is about to open two doors down from Fringe.

What Actually Closed, and What's Taking Its Place

The address is 1810 S. Catalina Ave. Until late April, it was Gabi James, a Spanish-French restaurant that ran for eight years in that spot. When it closed, the space sat empty for exactly one reason: Martha's was already circling it.

Martha's opened in Hermosa Beach in 1984. Condren and his team took over ownership about a decade ago, and after riding out the disruption of the pandemic years, he told the restaurant trade press that the business had finally normalized enough to expand. Riviera Village wasn't the only option on the table. It was the one where the city had just told restaurateurs, in a formal vote, that it planned to keep sidewalk seating in place for years, not months.

The new location takes over a 5,000-square-foot building split across two floors, nestled between Fringe and Redondo Beach Brew on Catalina. The upstairs floor solves a problem Martha's has wanted to fix for a while: a dedicated space for private events, something the original Hermosa Beach location was never built to handle. The kitchen will be led by Johnny De Vivo, previously executive chef at Rolling Hills Country Club, and the menu leans into the Martha's identity that regulars already know:

• Smashburgers, chicken dishes, and baby back ribs
• Steak, pastas, and short ribs, served across breakfast, lunch, and dinner
• A handful of dishes borrowed from Condren's other restaurant, the Hermosa Beach Italian spot The Bottle Inn

Condren's team has said they're eyeing three more locations over the next three years, stretching as far north as Santa Barbara and as far south as San Diego. If that plan holds, Riviera Village isn't just gaining a restaurant. It's becoming the proof-of-concept for a coastal restaurant group's next phase, which is a different kind of validation than a single new opening usually carries.

The Village Used To Turn Its Parklets On For Festival Weekends. Now They're Just There.

To understand why the five-year extension matters more than it sounds, it helps to remember how these parklets started. Back in 2020, the Riviera Village Association fronted roughly $35,000 to build barricaded outdoor dining spaces on both sides of Catalina Avenue, and the city waived parking meter fees to make it work. The plan was explicitly temporary, something to help restaurants survive a specific emergency.

That temporary framing lingered for years. Every summer, the Village would close its streets entirely for the Riviera Village Summer Festival, a three-day event that this June marked its 48th year, drawing more than 300 vendors along Catalina Avenue, Avenue I, Avenida del Norte, and Vista del Mar. For one weekend, the Village would feel like a pedestrian-first destination. Then the barricades would come down and the street would go back to being a street with some tables bolted to the curb.

The five-year extension erases that distinction. The everyday sidewalk footprint now has the same permanence the festival used to borrow for 72 hours at a time. A resident walking to dinner on a random Tuesday in October gets a version of the same outdoor seating capacity the Village used to reserve for its biggest weekend of the year.

What This Actually Changes For a Resident's Week

Most of what's visible right now on Catalina Avenue is smaller than a new restaurant. The Village just wrapped its annual Sidewalk Sale on August 22 and 23, the kind of event that draws people onto the block for a few hours and then empties back out. The Riviera Village Association's calendar already has a Halloween Trick-or-Treat event scheduled for later this year, another one of those evenings where the sidewalks fill with strollers and the shops stay open late.

Those events aren't new. What's new is the infrastructure underneath them. A five-year commitment to permanent outdoor dining means the restaurants along Catalina aren't rebuilding their patio setups every spring or lobbying the city for another short-term renewal. It means a place like Martha's can design a 5,000-square-foot buildout around the assumption that its outdoor seating is a fixture, not a negotiation.

For anyone who already treats Riviera Village as their regular rotation, the practical shift is availability. More seating that doesn't disappear after Labor Day weekend means more nights where a table is actually open. It also means the corridor between Fringe and Redondo Beach Brew is filling in as a full-day destination rather than just a dinner strip. Martha's serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the same building fills a gap the Village didn't fully have before: a reliable daytime anchor within a block that's historically leaned toward evening and happy hour traffic.

The Part Worth Watching

None of this happened because of a ribbon cutting or a press release. It happened because a city council vote this spring quietly reset the rules for how outdoor dining works in one six-block district, and a restaurant group with expansion ambitions noticed before most residents did. Condren said it plainly when asked why he picked this street over anywhere else in the South Bay: the decision to keep the outdoor dining program alive is part of what convinced him the Village's energy wasn't temporary.

If Martha's follow-through on those three additional locations holds up, Riviera Village will have been the test case. Worth remembering the next time a sidewalk table on Catalina Avenue feels like it's always been there. Five years ago, it wasn't. Five years from now, per this spring's vote, it's supposed to still be.

If you're curious how a shift like this shows up in what a home near Riviera Village is actually worth to buyers who prioritize walkability, that's the kind of on-the-ground read May-Ann Fisher tracks block by block across Redondo Beach. Book a consultation when you're ready to talk specifics.