What's New Along San Vicente: A Brentwood Summer Field Guide

Stand at the corner of 26th and San Vicente on a Saturday in late July, and you can feel the block working harder than it used to. The coral trees down the median are the same. The joggers are the same. What has changed is the tenant mix on the north side of the boulevard, and the pace at which chefs with recognizable names are choosing Brentwood over Beverly Hills, Venice, or the Arts District.

For years, the San Vicente corridor read as a residential stretch with a country mart at one end and a handful of tenured restaurants in between. The 2026 lineup tells a different story. Between April and the following spring, three chef-driven concepts will have opened within a ten-minute walk of one another, and none of them are the kind of place a resident would call "just a Brentwood restaurant." If you live here, the practical question is no longer whether to drive east for dinner. It's how to work these new rooms into a Saturday that already runs on the farmers' market and the Country Mart courtyard.

The four-menu experiment at 11770 San Vicente

Neighborly opened on Saturday, April 11, 2026 at 11770 San Vicente Blvd, with a food-hall format that lets a table order across four independent kitchens on one ticket. The lineup is the interesting part. What Gaby's Cooking is Chef Gaby Dalkin's first brick-and-mortar concept after years of cookbook and media work. Mini Kabob is the Martirosyan family's second location, extending a Glendale operation that has run on a two-burner scale for more than a decade. Mixtape is Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson's burger and sandwich concept. Palermo Pizza Club comes from Frank Pinello of Best Pizza in Williamson, New York, and this is his West Coast debut.

The reason to care, if you live here, is that Brentwood has historically been a single-menu neighborhood. A group of four with different appetites picked a restaurant by consensus or by veto. The Neighborly format resolves that in one line at four counters, which is a small operational detail that changes what a Wednesday dinner looks like when two kids want pizza, one adult wants kebab, and one wants a chopped salad.

Two blocks off San Vicente, a handroll counter with a lunch math problem

Savta, the handroll bar that opened at the Original Farmers Market last year, has taken a second, larger space at 906 S Barrington Ave. The menu is the same as the original: tuna with truffle and jalapeño, red snapper with yuzu kosho and cilantro, and a version with uni, caviar, and toro. The lunch special is where the interpretation lives. Weekdays, an appetizer plus three handrolls is $32.

Do the arithmetic against the neighborhood. A comparable handroll set at most Westside sushi counters runs closer to $50 before tax, and a single uni handroll on its own often lands north of $12. Savta's weekday lunch pricing is not a soft opening promotion. It is the operating menu, which puts a chef-driven raw bar in the same lunch budget as a bowl-and-drink at a fast-casual on Bundy. That is a real shift for a neighborhood where lunch options tighten quickly once you leave the Country Mart.

The next domino is already leased

The h.wood Group is developing Montana's, a restaurant and lounge slated for an early 2027 opening at 11920 San Vicente Blvd.

That is the same hospitality group behind Delilah and Harriet's. The signage is up. The build-out is underway. Whatever you think of the group's West Hollywood rooms, the address matters more than the concept: 11920 sits one block from Neighborly at 11770, which means by early 2027, a resident who wants a full evening out will be able to walk from a handroll counter to a food hall to a full-service lounge without moving a car.

That is the thesis in plain form. Brentwood is consolidating into a walkable food block, and the operators betting on it are the kind who usually pick Sunset, Melrose, or Abbot Kinney.

Sundays at Gretna Green are the ballast

None of the above changes the Sunday routine, which is arguably why residents tolerate the new pace. The Brentwood Certified Farmers' Market runs every Sunday from 9 AM to 2 PM at 741 Gretna Green Way, just off San Vicente next to the Brentwood Country Club. It is year-round and it is one of the larger Certified Farmers' Markets in the county by vendor count.

The composition is worth knowing if you have only been walking through:

• Arnett Farms carries the stone fruit rotation through summer, moving from apricots into peaches, plums, and pluots as the weeks progress.
• Yong Xiong Farms and Yang's Produce are where the Asian vegetables live, including varieties that don't reliably show up at the Wednesday Santa Monica market.
• Country Fresh Farms runs the microgreens table.
• Since the Palisades market shut down, several of its vendors relocated here, which is why the flower section grew noticeably in late 2025 and why a few of the prepared-food stalls will look familiar to former Palisades regulars.

A practical note residents figure out eventually: San Vicente parking along the golf course side is the fastest option if you arrive after 10:30, and the walk in from that direction is under five minutes. Jon & Vinny's is roughly the same distance in the opposite direction, which is how a lot of local Sundays end.

The Country Mart is still running its summer program

The Brentwood Country Mart at 225 26th Street is the other anchor, and its 2026 summer calendar reads almost exactly like its 1998 summer calendar, which is the point. Rowland Crawford's barn architecture from 1948 is still doing the work. What has been added is a tighter events schedule aimed at families who live within walking distance:

• Mart Littles Story Time, hosted by Cassidy Preschool in the courtyard, runs Wednesdays at 11 AM through the end of August.
• Free family-friendly Friday courtyard movie nights return in August, a program the Mart has run in some form for several years.
• Varley, the activewear brand, joined the tenant mix in July with a Wimbledon-style courtyard event on the 11th. Sweet Rose Creamery participated with complimentary ice cream, which is roughly how every new tenant opening at the Mart tends to look.
• Farmshop continues to take pre-orders for holiday and event food, including the fried chicken that has become the default order for anyone doing a Country Mart pickup.

If you have lived here more than a year, the value of the Mart is that it does not change. If you are new to the block, the Wednesday morning courtyard is a reasonable place to run into other people who live within four streets of you.

What this all means for a resident's weekend

The short version: a Brentwood weekend in August 2026 can now legitimately run on Brentwood alone. Saturday lunch at Savta on Barrington. Saturday evening across four counters at Neighborly. Sunday morning at Gretna Green. Sunday afternoon in the Country Mart courtyard with a movie starting at 6. Six months ago that itinerary would have required at least one drive east on San Vicente. Twelve months from now, Montana's will make it possible to keep an entire birthday dinner inside the same three-block radius.

That is a real change in how the neighborhood functions, and it is happening quietly, one lease at a time.

If you're weighing what all of this means for a home purchase, a sale, or a move-up decision on this side of the 405, May-Ann Fisher tracks the San Vicente corridor block by block and is happy to walk through what the new tenant mix is doing to buyer demand, foot traffic, and the resale case for the streets closest to the boulevard. Book a consultation when you're ready to talk.