Palisades Village Is Open Again. Your Old Sunday Isn't.

If you have spent any part of the last two decades wandering Swarthmore Avenue on a Sunday morning with a canvas bag and a coffee, prepare for a small disruption. The Pacific Palisades Farmers Market, running under that name since 2000, is not there this weekend. It moved to Wednesday afternoons, 1:30 to 5:30, and for now it is staying put on one street instead of two.

That is the detail almost every headline about Palisades Village's reopening skipped past on its way to the ribbon cutting. The bigger story out of Saturday, August 15 was not that the Village came back. It largely did, with a ceremony at 10:30 a.m. and doors open at 11. The bigger story is that it came back rearranged, and the rearranging touches something more personal than a storefront: the shape of your week.

The Address Returned Before the Habit Did

Palisades Village closed after the January 2025 fire, not because the buildings burned but because smoke and water damage required crews to strip parts of the property to the studs and rebuild from there, a job that ran past $100 million and took nineteen months. When the doors opened this month, roughly 70 percent of businesses were ready on day one, with the rest phasing in over the following months. So even the reopening itself is a staggered thing, not a single light switch.

Caruso has said the property is 99 percent leased, with about a third of the roster new to the Village rather than simply returning to old addresses. That fraction matters more than it sounds like it should. A third of the counters, hostess stands and register lines that used to run on autopilot now belong to names you have never used before.

Why the Market Skipped Sunday

The farmers market's move off Sunday was not an accident of scheduling. Organizers at Raw Inspiration, the nonprofit that has run the market since 2000, spent months looking for a workable location while Swarthmore itself remained closed, and once Caruso set the reopening date, they picked the first Wednesday after it: August 19. Sunday, it turns out, is a competitive day for vendors, many of whom already work other markets that day of the week. The switch is described as deliberate and temporary. Whether it drifts back to Sunday, and when, is not yet answered anywhere official, which means the honest thing to tell you is that Wednesday is the market's address for now, not necessarily forever.

For a ritual that has outlasted a pandemic closure and a full relocation to Brentwood's market during the worst of the post-fire displacement, a day-of-week change is a small ask. It still means rewiring a habit that, for a lot of households, has run on the same clock since before some of their kids could walk.

Who Actually Answered the Bell

The names returning read like the Village's own greatest hits: Erewhon, Blue Ribbon Sushi, Buck Mason, Anine Bing, Zimmermann, Brunello Cucinelli, Veronica Beard, PAIGE, Isabel Marant and Golden Goose among them. Buck Mason is coming back bigger, with an expanded store that adds a café concept. Porta Via rounds out the dining side alongside Alphabet Bar and Grill, a same-day new restaurant helmed by chef Timothy Hollingsworth.

Two names deserve a closer look, because they are not simply reopening in their old spots. K Bakery and Loomey's Toys both burned at their original locations elsewhere in the Palisades and are relocating into the Village for the first time, joining the property rather than returning to it.

New to the property entirely: Nancy Silverton's Italian steakhouse Spacca Tutto, her first restaurant on the Westside, along with the first West Coast location for activewear brand LESET, plus Violet Grey and Xirena.

The Stores That Aren't Walking Back In

Aerin, Aesop, Lululemon and Saint Laurent all elected not to return. The Draycott, a longtime Village restaurant, is a different case entirely: it had already announced its closure days before the fires, so its absence has nothing to do with the disaster at all. Worth separating those two facts, because it is easy to fold every empty storefront into one fire narrative when at least one of them was simply a business decision made on its own timeline, weeks before the wind came up.

For residents, the practical effect is the same either way. A few of the errands that used to happen on reflex, a stop at Aesop on the way to lunch, a Lululemon return dropped off between appointments, now require a different plan.

elysewalker Moves In, Angelini Comes Back Quietly

Two individual stories say more about this reopening than the tenant count does. Elyse Walker had run her namesake boutique across the street from the Village for nearly three decades before the fire destroyed it. She is not rebuilding across the street. She is moving her business into the Village itself, into an 8,000-square-foot boutique, a relocation that folds one of the neighborhood's longest-running independent businesses into the anchor property for the first time.

Chef Gino Angelini's return runs the opposite direction. He has said his reopening of Angelini Ristorante & Bar at the Village would be intentionally low-key, out of respect for residents still working through their own recovery. That single choice, made by one restaurant owner rather than by any press release, is a more honest temperature check on where the neighborhood actually is than the ribbon cutting's finale concert and drone show. Rick Caruso, at that ceremony, put it plainly: "We promised to come back better than before the fires, and we did." Mayor Karen Bass, in a joint statement with Caruso ahead of the opening, framed the stakes in blunter terms, saying it matters that residents have places to eat, shop, and come together so that they do not have to leave their community.

Not every resident is back to take advantage of either. Reporting around the reopening has noted that construction is visibly busy across the Palisades, more than 1,000 new homes already underway with thousands of permits in progress, even as a meaningful share of former residents have not returned. The Village's reopening is real progress. It is one piece of a longer rebuild, not a finish line, and Caruso said as much himself at the ribbon cutting, calling it a mega-step with many more still ahead.

The Week, Rebuilt

Beyond opening weekend, the Village settles into a new recurring schedule, and this is the part worth taping to your refrigerator, because none of it matches the old rhythm exactly.

Complimentary parking runs through September 30. There is no village admission fee. You pay for whatever you eat, shop for or valet.

The historic Bay Theater, operated by Netflix since 2021 and one of the few Village fixtures that survived the fire structurally intact, is coming back online this month as well, restoring the five-screen cinema that has anchored Village nights out since 2018.

A Different Kind of Normal

None of this erases the last nineteen months. It resets the clock on a specific set of habits, where you get coffee before an errand, which Sunday used to belong to the market, which storefront you walked past without thinking about it. The honest version of this story is not that the Palisades got its old self back on August 15. It got a version of itself with a third new tenants, a market that moved days, and at least four familiar names that are not walking back through the door. Worth learning the new choreography on purpose, rather than assuming muscle memory will do it for you.

For those of us who call the Palisades and the Highlands home, moments like this are part of what makes the neighborhood worth paying attention to, block by block, season by season. If you are thinking through what any of this means for your own plans on the Westside, Kyle Leibovitch is glad to talk it through. Schedule a consultation whenever the timing is right for you.