What's New on Sawtelle Boulevard: Two Dining Scenes

On the last Saturday of July, the drum tower went up on Corinth Avenue. Bon odori practice had been running since June, and by 4 p.m. on the 25th, the West Los Angeles Buddhist Temple's parking lot was full of folding chairs, teriyaki smoke, and the particular hush that comes right before taiko starts. This was the temple's 76th consecutive Obon, a run stretching back to the early 1950s, and the crowd knew the choreography: park north of Nebraska if you can find it, walk in, buy scrip tickets at the booth, eat standing up.

A short drive away, at Olympic and Bundy, a dozen storefronts in a shopping center most locals still call "the aquarium" were papering their windows for openings nobody at the temple that weekend was talking about yet.

Both of those spots are Sawtelle. They are not the same Sawtelle, and the corridor has quietly split into two distinct restaurant scenes over the past year, running on two different business models even when the addresses sit close together. If you've lived in West LA for a while and think you know the corridor, you probably know one half of it very well and have barely registered the other.

The corridor you already know just got a Michelin bump

North of Olympic, along Sawtelle Boulevard between Santa Monica and Olympic, the food scene is the one that built Sawtelle's reputation in the first place: ramen counters, izakaya windows, ice cream shops that go back a decade. That corridor got serious validation this year. Michelin Guide California's mid-2026 additions named two Sawtelle restaurants specifically. The Mulberry, a modern Korean bistro at 1800 Sawtelle Blvd from restaurant-industry couple David Lee and Jennifer Chon, made the list for its charcoal-grilled short ribs and moody, dark-wood dining room. So did Kojima, an eight-seat counter tucked on the second floor of a Sawtelle strip mall at 2130 Sawtelle Blvd, where chef Hayato Kojima runs an L-shaped bar alone, with no printed menu, translating his daily choices through bilingual floor staff.

Those two openings say something specific about this stretch of the boulevard: it has become a place where a restaurant with eight seats and no menu can find an audience without moving to Beverly Hills first. The corridor's identity as Sawtelle Japantown, officially recognized by Los Angeles City Council in 2015, has held even as the food has gotten more ambitious. YAKUN, an eight-seat, reservation-only yakitori omakase counter, has opened this summer in the former Mizu 212 space at Sawtelle and La Grange, arriving with enough polish that it's already part of the same conversation as The Mulberry and Kojima. That's three tasting-counter concepts on one strip in a single year, a density this corridor didn't have before.

A second cluster is filling in around Olympic and Bundy

The second Sawtelle is less photogenic and easier to miss, because it isn't built around tasting menus. It's forming inside the retail redevelopment happening around Olympic and Bundy, split across One Westside, the two-story shopping center built in 1996 and anchored by Marshalls, Michael's, and HomeGoods, and the newer West Edge complex next door.

One Westside is easy to drive past without registering, mostly because its most famous feature for thirty years has been a neon fish tank sculpture rather than anything on a plate. That's changing. Tsukiji Gindaco Sakaba, an izakaya-style outpost of the Osaka takoyaki chain Gindaco, has taken over the old Sunmerry Bakery space, bringing fried octopus balls and sake to a spot that used to sell only pastries. Chicken Bun Bun opened its third location, after Alhambra and Newport Beach, serving its proprietary chicken sandwiches alongside wraps and tenders. Next door at West Edge, a second outpost of Kinkan, the half-Japanese, half-Thai concept known for made-to-order chirashi bento boxes, is aiming for a 2026 opening, and a sushi spot called Sudachi promising "world-class sushi" is building out a space in the same complex.

None of these are eight-seat tasting counters. They're expansions, second locations, and chain outposts testing the Westside for the first time. That's not a coincidence. A shopping center with 450 parking spaces and big-box anchors solves a problem that a single storefront on the historic strip can't: parking, square footage, and the ability to run a kitchen built for volume rather than intimacy. The restaurants filling in around One Westside and West Edge aren't chasing a Michelin inspector. They're chasing the same commuter and resident traffic that already stops for Marshalls, just later in the day and hungrier.

Meanwhile the historic strip keeps adding to its own count without slowing down. Emporium Thai, a Westwood institution run by the same family behind the acclaimed Jitlada on Sunset Boulevard, expanded onto Sawtelle Boulevard under executive chef Gina Sungkamee, its first location outside the original Westwood spot in over two decades. Mian, a casual Sichuan chain, opened its first Westside outpost in the space that used to be Dong Ting Noodle, keeping the zhiang jian noodles and hot and sour soup that regulars came for while broadening the menu around them.

For a resident, that split has a practical use. If you're planning a night that needs a reservation weeks out, look at the historic strip. If you want somewhere to walk into on a Tuesday without a plan, the Olympic and Bundy cluster is building itself for exactly that. The old mental map of Sawtelle as a single strip between Santa Monica and Olympic was never wrong, it's just no longer complete.

The one weekend a year both halves remember they're one neighborhood

Obon is the exception. The temple sits inside the historic north corridor's footprint at 2003 Corinth Avenue, an easy walk from the ramen counters and shave ice lines, but the crowd it draws is large enough that the city has arranged what organizers call "relaxed parking," letting attendees park without a ticket on the blocks between Nebraska and Mississippi, running east to west from Corinth to Colby. If you live inside that box, walking is the obvious move. If you live outside it, the practical play this year was to park south of Olympic near One Westside, grab dinner at one of the new arrivals, and walk north to the temple in time for the taiko set around 5:30. It's the one weekend when the two Sawtelles function as a single connected evening instead of two separate destinations you'd normally plan for on different nights.

If you're orienting yourself on the current map, here's the quick version:

• Tasting counters on the historic strip: The Mulberry (1800 Sawtelle Blvd), Kojima (2130 Sawtelle Blvd, Ste. 211), YAKUN (Sawtelle and La Grange)
• Expansions and chains around Olympic and Bundy: Tsukiji Gindaco Sakaba, Chicken Bun Bun, and, at the West Edge complex, Kinkan and Sudachi
• New arrivals on the boulevard itself: Emporium Thai (1653 Sawtelle Blvd) and Mian, both recent additions to the historic run
• The annual bridge between all of it: West LA Buddhist Temple Obon, held each July at 2003 Corinth Avenue, with the temple's festival details available through LAist's community calendar

The corridor isn't becoming one thing. It's running two different restaurant experiments on the same half-mile of boulevard, and both are worth walking.

If you've been meaning to walk both halves of Sawtelle this fall, the temple weekend is a year away, but the restaurants aren't waiting. And if a longer stay in West LA is starting to cross your mind, whether that's more space, a different block, or just a better view of this corridor from your own kitchen, May-Ann Fisher has spent enough time on this exact stretch of the Westside to talk through what it actually looks like on the ground. Book a consultation whenever that conversation makes sense for you.