Walk Catalina Avenue on a Friday night this August and you will wait for a patio table. Walk the commercial strip along Pacific Coast Highway a few miles north, or head south past the Torrance line, and the sidewalks tell a different story: folded umbrellas, empty parklets, restaurants that quietly pulled their outdoor seating back into the dining room years ago.
That gap is not an accident of foot traffic or a good summer. It traces to a single vote the Redondo Beach City Council took in May, and to a forty-year-old restaurant that read that vote correctly enough to bet on it.
The tables everyone else took down
Every beach city on this stretch of coast built the same thing during the pandemic: temporary parklets and street closures that let restaurants seat customers outdoors when indoor dining wasn't an option. Almost everywhere, those structures came down once the emergency ended. Redondo Beach didn't take that path in Riviera Village. As WhatNow Los Angeles reported in late May, other beach cities have largely removed the temporary outdoor dining spaces put in place during the pandemic, while Redondo kept its version of the program running on Catalina Avenue years past its original expiration.
What the council actually did
That holdover wasn't permanent until this year. In May 2026, the Redondo Beach City Council voted to extend the outdoor dining deck program in Riviera Village for another five years, converting what had been a rolling, year-to-year policy into something restaurant owners could plan a lease around. That distinction matters more than it sounds. A business deciding whether to sign a multi-year commercial lease needs to know if the sidewalk seating that doubles its capacity will still be legal in year three. Before May, nobody could answer that with certainty.
A restaurant just up the coast answered it anyway, and moved.
Why a forty-year-old restaurant moved because of it
Martha's has operated in Hermosa Beach since 1984. Co-owner Hilary Condren's team took over the business about a decade ago, and after what Condren described to WhatNow as the restaurant industry's chaotic pandemic years finally normalizing, the brand was ready to expand for the first time. It chose Riviera Village.
The new location sits at 1810 S. Catalina Ave, in the space last occupied by Gabi James, a Spanish-French restaurant that closed in late April 2026 after an eight-year run. Martha's is taking over the full 5,000-square-foot building, split across two floors, with the upstairs finally giving the team the private event space Condren said they'd been chasing for years. The restaurant has also brought on Johnny De Vivo, formerly executive chef at Rolling Hills Country Club, to run the kitchen.
Condren didn't frame the move as a real estate decision so much as a bet on what the street had become. Asked why Riviera Village specifically, Condren pointed to the outdoor dining extension as part of what keeps the neighborhood's energy up, telling WhatNow simply that "their downtown, their heartbeat is on fire."
The scale of the bet is worth sitting with. Martha's isn't opening a single new location to test a concept. The team told WhatNow they're hoping to open three additional locations over the next three years, along the coast as far north as Santa Barbara and as far south as San Diego. Riviera Village is the first stop on that list, not a side project.
The street already had a precedent
Martha's isn't the first business to build specifically around Riviera Village's outdoor culture. In July 2024, a defunct liquor store on the same strip was converted into BeachLife Grotto, a seafood restaurant and retail concept from a partner group that included BeachLife Festival co-founder Allen Sanford, former Redondo Beach Police Chief Keith Kauffman, Pennywise's Jim Lindberg, and Skechers' Michael Greenburg. Local architect Miles Pritzkat, whose office is also in the Village, designed the two-story building with an open-beam top-floor deck built for outdoor use from the start. Sanford described the goal as filling a gap that didn't exist in the Riviera before, modeling the concept loosely on two bygone favorites he remembered from childhood, the Admiral Risty in Palos Verdes and Millie Riera's Seafood Grotto, which he used to visit as a kid near Avenue I and the Esplanade.
The Grotto's ground-up outdoor design and Martha's retrofit into an existing footprint are two different bets on the same premise: that a sidewalk seat in Riviera Village is worth building around, not an afterthought.
The weekend that showed the difference
The clearest proof of that premise this year wasn't a restaurant opening. It was the 48th Annual Riviera Village Summer Festival, held June 26 through 28 along Catalina Avenue, Avenue I, Avenida del Norte, and Vista del Mar. Vendor counts varied by listing, with some putting the number near 150 and most independent calendars, including Patch and Local Anchor, citing over 300 exhibitors, but every source agreed on the shape of the weekend: a beer and wine garden with continuous live music at the Main Stage on Avenue I and Catalina, a second stage for emerging local acts at 1820 S. Catalina Ave, an international food court, and free admission with a complimentary shuttle running from South High School in Torrance. None of that requires the outdoor dining program to exist. But a festival built around eating and drinking on a closed street lands differently in a Village that already treats its sidewalks as extra dining room the rest of the year.
What's actually different if you walk it this month
- Martha's, 1810 S. Catalina Ave, occupying the former Gabi James space with chef Johnny De Vivo now running the kitchen
- BeachLife Grotto, the two-story seafood spot built into a former liquor store, now in its third summer of operation
- The outdoor dining decks themselves, no longer a temporary holdover but a fixture through at least 2031
- The established Catalina Avenue dining strip that includes names like Salt & Pearl, Turquoise, and Il Posto, all operating on a street that never gave its sidewalk seating back
None of this changes what Riviera Village has always been, a walkable strip a block from the sand with a restaurant scene that outkicks its size. What changed is the certainty underneath it. A five-year commitment from the city is why a forty-year-old restaurant felt safe enough to sign a lease on a two-floor building instead of waiting to see what happens.
For residents who've watched Catalina Avenue's rhythm shift over the past year, this is the piece that connects the dots between a busier sidewalk and a bureaucratic vote most people never read. If you're curious how these same corridor-level shifts show up in Redondo Beach's broader housing patterns, our North and South Redondo Beach guide breaks down what the two sides of town actually offer. For a fuller look at the neighborhood itself, the Redondo Beach community page is a good next stop.
If you're weighing a move within the South Bay, whether it's Redondo Beach or the Hermosa Beach community Martha's is expanding out of, Azure Hynes can walk you through what these neighborhood-level shifts actually mean for buyers and sellers. Let's Connect.
