Walk east on Montana Avenue from Ocean and count the paper-covered windows from a year ago. Most are gone. In their place: a black-awninged smashburger counter, an incoming gelato shop next door to Sogno Toscano, and a schedule of ribbon cuttings that has kept the city's mayor busy through spring.
That is the shorthand version of a bigger shift. Santa Monica's dining scene split into two lanes in 2026, and both are running at full speed. On one side, accessible neighborhood counters are backfilling storefronts on Montana, Main, and the Promenade at a pace the city has not seen since before the pandemic. On the other, the fine-dining pocket at the Ocean Park end of Main Street just picked up a James Beard Best Chef win. For a resident, the practical result is a walk-to dinner map that is denser and stranger than it was twelve months ago.
Montana Avenue is quietly the busiest block in town
The Win~Dow's arrival at 930 Montana Ave. was the loudest of the openings. The 50-seat restaurant took over a space previously occupied by the Go Get Em Tiger coffee shop and was designed by the Klein Agency with murals by Los Angeles artist KC Haxton. It is part of the American Gonzo Food Corp portfolio, which launched the concept in Venice along Rose Avenue during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Santa Monica location is the brand's seventh, joining The Grove, Hollywood, Long Beach, Venice, Silver Lake and Santa Barbara. The draw is a menu built around a flat-top griddled patty smashed with onions, topped with American cheese, pickles and a pink house sauce served on a soft potato bun, priced to move.
If The Win~Dow anchors the west end of the strip, the north end is about to get its own draw. A second Santa Monica location of Italian gelato brand Bacio di Latte is coming to 1510 Montana Ave., next to Italian market Sogno Toscano. Two Italian storefronts in a row on a block that lost its longtime coffee tenant is the kind of turnover a resident notices before any market report does.
The Promenade has a new front door
For years, the standard critique of the Third Street Promenade was that its retail base had thinned faster than its tenants could be replaced. That story is getting a rewrite this summer.
Santa Monica welcomed two new restaurant openings in as many days in June, with Raising Cane's Chicken Fingers cutting the ribbon on the Third Street Promenade and The Win~Dow burger concept debuting at 930 Montana Ave., adding more than 100 jobs to a city working to revitalize its economic core. Mayor Caroline Torosis attended the Cane's opening, and the chain's Santa Monica outpost leaned local: disco ball surfboards on the ceiling crafted by a local artisan and murals drawing from the chain's origins.
The interesting number is not the burger price. It is the job count. The new Raising Cane's location is expected to create 100 local jobs, and city leaders paired the opening with a broader wave of downtown activations including a new FIFA store. Read that alongside the Promenade's vacancy narrative and it lands differently: Santa Monica is not just filling storefronts, it is filling them with concepts that require staff.
Ocean Park and Main Street are having a chef moment
While the Promenade is stacking accessible chains, the Ocean Park and Main Street corridor is running the opposite play.
The headline is Dave Beran. Seline, his tasting-menu restaurant on Main Street in the Ocean Park neighbourhood, opened in December 2024 and landed on the 2025 Michelin Guide within months, and in June 2026 the work here won Beran the James Beard Award for Best Chef: California. The menu is not casual. The seasonal menu runs fourteen to eighteen courses at $295, with dishes that read as familiar and strange at once: golden osetra caviar over hazelnuts with a coffee anglaise to close, dry-aged beef tartare with celery root and savoury granola, roasted leeks with a foamy eucalyptus sauce. If you want a table, plan ahead: the James Beard win has made tables scarce, and the guidance is to book three to four weeks ahead.
Beran's other Main Street room, Pasjoli, is the softer landing. The one-star French bistro at 2732 Main Street opened in 2019 and earned a Michelin star in 2021, with wood beams, exposed brick, and white kitchen tile, and its pressed duck, prepared in the traditional canard a la presse, is the signature and the dish to build a meal around.
A few blocks away, the neighborhood is about to get another chef-led opening. PonTu will open at 3117 Ocean Park Blvd., the previous home to longstanding The OP Cafe, with Richie Lopez behind the forthcoming spot after years working with various restaurant groups and concepts. Lopez plans to serve both a lunch and dinner program, focusing on "cooking with the memory of Peru," with menu items focused on seasonal Peruvian cuisine with California coastal elements. There is still no set opening timeline, as the team is waiting on permits.
Also on Santa Monica Boulevard is a newer name worth putting on the list. Holy Basil Santa Monica is Wedchayan "Deau" Arpapornnopparat and Tongkamal "Joy" Yuon's continued expansion of their famous DTLA window, dishing out Thai street food made with hyper-local ingredients on the Westside, and it reads as bright, busy and boisterous, a love letter to Bangkok. The address is 2828 Santa Monica Blvd.
The map of what is coming next
Several openings are still in the works. If you are the kind of resident who bookmarks a new spot before it opens, the short list looks like this:
- Bower Santa Monica, Colorado Center. A surf-inspired, all-day restaurant and community hub set to open this summer at Colorado Center, spanning approximately 6,500 square feet, offering food and beverage, health and wellness programming and what its creators describe as "socialization rituals" at the 15-acre office campus, announced April 15 by BXP alongside restaurateur Dave Harper and New School Hospitality. Harper is the founding partner of Amigo Roasters and the restaurateur behind community-focused venues including Bondi Harvest, El Chucho, Palmys and Likeminded Wellness Club, and the restaurant draws its name from Fairy Bower, a break in the Cabbage Tree Bay of Manly Beach in Australia.
- Gott's Roadside, downtown Santa Monica. Gott's will open two LA locations in 2026, the first at the Original Farmers Market, then one in Downtown Santa Monica later this summer, and the retro-inspired Bay Area diner is best known for burgers topped with things like green chile, griddled mushrooms, or kimchi, plus classics like garlic fries, cobb salads, hot dogs, and shakes.
- La Diperie, 2441 Main St. The closure of Holey Grail Donuts at 2441 Main St. has made way for a new dessert concept, with a notice on the door indicating La Diperie will be moving in, a Montreal-founded chain that specializes in dipped ice cream, cakes, donuts and cookies served with a selection of chocolate dips and more than 20 toppings, with more than 65 locations across Canada and into Florida, and the Santa Monica outpost would mark the brand's first West Coast location.
- Jade Rabbit. A fast-casual Chinese American restaurant in Santa Monica from Bryant Ng and Kim Luu-Ng, the couple behind now-closed Cassia, offering a well-composed build-your-own combo meal with combos of two bases, two vegetables and a main starting at $13, with upgrades for premium proteins like garlic chili shrimp, a lomo saltado-inspired beef and broccoli, and Sichuan-flavored spicy minced lamb.
Also worth noting for the coastal set: Westside Oyster Club, located in the old Blue Plate Oysterette space, is a beachside raw bar from the people behind The Albright on Santa Monica Pier, with a Cape Cod white-tiled dining room and a menu of clam chowder bread bowls, oysters raw, grilled, or fried, and lobster rolls with housemade chips.
What the pattern actually says
Roundups usually stop here. The list is the point. In Santa Monica this year, the list is the setup.
Three signals sit inside the same six months. A national chain chose the Promenade and paired it with a 100-job hire. A chef with a Michelin star and a fresh James Beard picked up his California crown a mile south on Main Street. A publicly traded office landlord signed a 6,500-square-foot lease at Colorado Center for a wellness-slanted restaurant. Those three tenants would not normally share a city, let alone a neighborhood.
The through-line is that Santa Monica's operators are betting on foot traffic returning at every price point at once. The affordable end is filling the Promenade and Montana. The chef-driven end is deepening in Ocean Park. The office-adjacent middle is opening at Colorado Center. Residents get a rare summer where the answer to "where should we go tonight" is different from the answer three months ago, and different again from what it will be in September when Gott's and PonTu open their doors.
For anyone who has lived here through the last few years of storefront turnover, that is the news. The map is not just refilling. It is reorganizing.
If you are thinking about how your own block fits into this shift, whether you are weighing a move within Santa Monica or considering what your current home is worth in a market where the streetscape keeps changing, Kyle Leibovitch is glad to talk it through. Schedule a consultation to compare notes on the neighborhood you actually live in.
