Santa Monica's Most Interesting New Restaurant Isn't on a Street You'd Walk Down

Ask a longtime Santa Monica resident where the restaurant action is this year and you'll get four different answers depending on which side of town they live on. The Promenade crowd will point to the new fried chicken line snaking around Third Street. The North of Montana crowd will mention the burger window that used to be a coffee shop. Main Street regulars will bring up the gelato shop that replaced the donut shop that replaced something else. All of them are right, and all of them are only telling you about their own block.

The more useful observation is what happens when you stop looking at any single corridor and look at all four at once. Santa Monica isn't having one restaurant boom this year. It's having four separate ones, each following a different logic, and the newest and arguably most telling of them isn't happening on a retail street at all.

Four Corridors, Four Different Bets

Downtown is the chain corridor right now. Raising Cane's Chicken Fingers opened on the Third Street Promenade in June, drawing a line that reportedly started forming the night before. Mayor Caroline Torosis attended the opening and framed it as part of a broader push to bring foot traffic back to the city's commercial core. The location added roughly 100 local jobs, and the interior includes disco ball surfboards built by a local artisan alongside murals referencing the chain's original restaurant. A few blocks away, a Taco Bell Cantina has filed permits for a new spot, in a move that could displace The Britannia Pub, a long-running downtown bar looking for a new home in the city. Downtown is betting on volume and recognizable names to rebuild the Promenade's daytime and evening crowds.

Montana Avenue is telling a quieter story. Most of what's changed there this year isn't new square footage, it's turnover. The Win~Dow, a smash-burger concept born on Rose Avenue in Venice, took over 930 Montana Ave in June, in a space that had been home to Go Get Em Tiger until the coffee shop closed abruptly. The swap says something on its own: a corner that used to hold a laptop-and-cortado crowd for an hour now moves a line of people through in about five minutes for a double cheeseburger. Up the block, a second Bacio di Latte gelato shop is opening at 1510 Montana, next to the Italian market Sogno Toscano, and window paper has gone up at 1307 Montana announcing ROLLD Sushi, an Australian-style hand roll concept. Warby Parker opened at 1311B Montana back in February, another sign of a national brand slotting comfortably into a street that has always mixed independent boutiques with a handful of bigger names. Montana isn't expanding so much as recycling itself, one storefront at a time.

Main Street and the Ocean Park end lean casual and sentimental. La Diperie, a Montreal-founded dipped ice cream chain with more than 65 locations across Canada and Florida, is opening its first West Coast location at 2441 Main St, in the spot Holey Grail Donuts vacated. Down toward the water, West Side Oyster Club took over the former Blue Plate Oysterette space at 1355 Ocean Ave, a corner that had served the neighborhood for 16 years before closing in January. And Circle Bar, Main Street's long-running dive bar, reopened after a three-year closure under the owners of Hinano Cafe, giving the round bar and its neon sign back to regulars who'd assumed it was gone for good.

Then there's Wilshire, which hasn't changed corridors at all, and that's the point. Wilshire and the Main Street fine dining pocket around it are where Santa Monica's most decorated kitchens already sit: Josiah Citrin's two-Michelin-star Melisse, chef Dave Beran's Seline, which won the 2026 James Beard Award for Best Chef California, and Beran's one-star bistro Pasjoli. This is the one corridor in the city that isn't turning over. It's holding.

The One That Isn't on a Street at All

Here's the detail that's easy to miss if you're only scanning restaurant roundups: the most ambitious opening of the year isn't on Montana, Main, Wilshire, or the Promenade. It's inside an office park.

Bower Santa Monica is set to open this month at Colorado Center, a 15-acre, six-building office campus near the Expo Line that BXP, the country's largest publicly traded office developer, has been slowly turning into more of a public destination. The 6,500-square-foot restaurant comes from Dave Harper, the restaurateur behind Amigo Roasters, Bondi Harvest, El Chucho, and Likeminded Wellness Club, in partnership with New School Hospitality. It's built to run all day, from espresso and grain bowls in the morning to shareable plates, whole grilled fish, and cocktails in the evening, open from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and until 10 p.m. on weekends.

The name comes from Fairy Bower, a surf break in Australia's Cabbage Tree Bay, and the design leans into that with accordion doors, wood and driftwood finishes, and an outdoor patio meant to feel more like a neighborhood hangout than a corporate cafeteria.

What makes this worth paying attention to isn't the menu. It's the address. A landlord doesn't spend money building an all-day restaurant with dinner service and cocktails inside an office campus unless it believes the people who work there are actually showing up in person, often enough and for long enough hours to support a full day of service. Placing a restaurant like this at Colorado Center is a wager that the weekday office crowd, the one that thinned out for years, has enough weight again to fill a room built for morning coffee through evening drinks.

"From an economic development perspective, the city's been working really hard on returning economic activity to our downtown."

That line from Mayor Torosis was about the Promenade, but it applies just as well to Colorado Center. Both bets rest on the same question: will people come back to a place they used to just pass through. The Promenade is testing it with chicken fingers. Colorado Center is testing it with an all-day restaurant that only makes financial sense if the office towers around it are fuller than they were.

The Week to See It for Yourself

If you want to see these four corridors side by side without driving all over the city, the Montana Avenue Art Walk on October 3 is the moment to do it. The event closes a 10-block stretch of Montana, from Sixth to Seventeenth Streets, to car traffic for the day and doubles as Santa Monica's official centennial event for Route 66. It's also the first time restaurants along the Avenue will be allowed to sell drinks to go for outdoor consumption, using the framework California adopted after Governor Newsom signed Senate Bill 969 in 2024. Santa Monica was the first city in Southern California to use that law, first for a Third Street Promenade entertainment zone in 2025, and now for Montana Avenue's own event footprint.

The Montana Avenue Merchants Association, a business group that's represented the corridor since 1979, handed production of this year's walk to Venice Blvd Productions, the team behind the Venice Fest, which has drawn more than 20,000 attendees in past editions. That's a bigger ambition than the Art Walk has carried before, and it lands in the same season that The Win~Dow, the second Bacio di Latte, and ROLLD Sushi are all reshaping the same stretch of sidewalk.

Reading the Map, Not Just the Menu

None of these four stories would tell you much on their own. A new burger window on Montana is just a burger window. A restaurant inside an office park is just a restaurant. It's only when you look at all four corridors together that a clearer picture shows up: Santa Monica is spending this year testing which parts of the city can pull people back in, whether that's downtown shoppers, Montana Avenue regulars, Main Street nostalgics, or, in the most unexpected case, office workers who might finally be back at their desks often enough to grab lunch downstairs.

If you live here, that's a useful lens for anything else that changes on your own block this year. Rick Ojeda has spent more than three decades reading Los Angeles neighborhoods this way, watching for the signals underneath the obvious ones. If you're curious what a corridor's changes might mean for a property near it, Rick Ojeda is glad to talk it through.