Abbot Kinney's Festival Is Back After Two Years: Here's What Changed on the Boulevard

The last time the Abbot Kinney Festival closed the boulevard, it was September 2023. Stages went up between Venice Boulevard and Main Street, more than 300 vendors lined both sidewalks, and the street ran on its usual once-a-year rhythm before going quiet again the next morning. Then the festival didn't happen. Not in 2024. Not in 2025.

On Sunday, September 27, it returns for its 40th edition, running its usual 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. But the boulevard the festival is walking back onto isn't the one it left. If you live within a few blocks of Abbot Kinney, you've probably already noticed. If you haven't walked the full stretch lately, the difference is worth seeing before the crowds show up.

The Two Years the Boulevard Didn't Wait

Organizers pointed to a sponsorship slowdown that hit street festivals nationally, and said the pause would give the Abbot Kinney Festival Association room to restructure. The festival has run for more than four decades and is the nonprofit's largest annual fundraiser, with proceeds historically supporting Venice youth programs, arts grants, and community projects. Two canceled years in a row was new territory for an event that had never gone dark that long outside the pandemic shutdowns.

What didn't pause was the street itself. While the festival board worked through its own math, operators kept signing leases, chefs kept opening kitchens, and two hotel projects kept moving through construction at opposite ends of the boulevard. None of it waited for permission from a festival calendar. By the time vendor applications opened again on April 1 of this year, the street they were applying to set up on had already changed shape.

Two Hotels, One Reason the Restaurants Kept Coming

The most structurally important thing happening on Abbot Kinney right now isn't a restaurant. It's a pair of hotel projects rising at the same time on opposite ends of the same street, something the boulevard hasn't seen in decades.

At the northern end, the Venice Place project is building a 78-room hotel across from Westminster Elementary, designed by local architect David Hertz, known for adaptive reuse work including the 747 Wing House in Santa Monica. The project is built into the existing block rather than walled off from it, preserving current restaurant frontage and adding a landscaped courtyard with multiple pedestrian entrances. Felix Trattoria anchors the food side. When Felix opened in 2017, Esquire named it the best new restaurant in America, and it picked up a James Beard Award finalist nomination the following year.

At the southern end, near Main Street, 881 Abbot Kinney has been years in the making. The project was approved by the Zoning Administrator back in 2006 and by the West LA Planning Department the following year, but didn't get a building permit until August 2022. It's a 43-room hotel with five condominiums and just under 1,200 square feet of ground-floor retail, on four contiguous lots at the corner of Abbot Kinney and Main. Both projects are slated for completion in the 2025 to 2026 window.

Here's why that matters more than the room counts suggest. A boulevard that only sees day-trippers doesn't need a dinner reservation at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday. Visitors who drive in, eat, and drive home don't sustain a full evening of service the way someone sleeping upstairs does. Chefs who spent years calculating whether Venice could support a serious dinner program are now running different numbers, because for the first time, there will be guests upstairs who need somewhere to eat that isn't a hotel restaurant.

The Kitchens That Landed While the Festival Was Dark

That shift shows up clearest in who chose to open here over the past two years, while the festival sat out its usual September slot.

• RVR opened in October 2024 at the address where chef Travis Lett once ran the short-lived MTN pop-up, marking his return after a five-year break from running the kitchen at Gjelina down the block. LA Magazine named it among the best new restaurants in Los Angeles for 2026, and reservations run weeks out. The menu leans on Japanese technique applied to California produce, chicken karaage, roasted sweet potato, hand rolls, and a Santa Barbara black cod that regulars keep reordering.
• The Tasting Kitchen reopened on July 16 at 1633 Abbot Kinney under founding chef Casey Lane, who first opened the restaurant in 2009 and built a reputation on handwritten, constantly shifting menus. A fire closed it roughly three years ago. The reopened restaurant runs both à la carte and a tasting menu, with the beverage program led by Blake Antrobus, who most recently worked at Monsieur Dior by Dominique Crenn. It expanded to seven-day service with late hours running to 1 a.m. starting in August.
• BADMAASH planted its third Los Angeles location at 1616 Abbot Kinney, joining outposts downtown and in Fairfax. The Venice menu adds steak frites with Indian spices and lamb neck korma, and it's the brand's first location with a full cocktail program.
• Truly Pizza, the Orange County chain known for three-day fermented dough, has committed to a 4,655-square-foot location at 1239 Abbot Kinney seating around 130 people indoors and out, with pies ranging from a $19 classic cheese to a $30 Suprema.
• ¡Salud! opened at 417 Washington Blvd in late January, just off the boulevard, and held a ribbon-cutting with the Venice Chamber of Commerce on January 24. By early March, roughly 100 locals turned out for a Chamber mixer there. It runs a split shift, specialty coffee and Latin-inspired breakfast in the morning, mezcal cocktails and tapas after dark.

None of these openings needed the festival to draw a crowd. They're evidence the neighborhood's daily rhythm kept running at full speed while the boulevard's marquee event sat dormant.

What Sunday, September 27 Actually Looks Like

For anyone who hasn't been to an Abbot Kinney Festival before, or hasn't been since 2023, here's what to expect this year:

1. Scale. Past editions have drawn crowds estimated at more than 100,000 by the festival's own organizers, with some outside estimates running higher across the day. More than 300 vendors typically line both sides of the boulevard between Venice Boulevard and Main Street.
2. Parking and access. Official festival lots run valet-only at $25, with proceeds feeding back into the festival's community fund. Public lots sit at Westminster Elementary on Main Street, along Windward and Electric Avenues, near Venice Pier on Washington, and in Marina del Rey. Free bike valet stations sit at each end of the festival footprint.
3. Where the money goes. The Abbot Kinney Festival Association is a 501(c)(3) that uses the event as its primary annual fundraiser, and has directed more than $300,000 in proceeds toward Venice youth, arts, and civic programs over the years.

Walking the Boulevard After

The festival crowd on September 27 is going to meet a street that looks different from the one that hosted the last edition. There's a reopened institution with a James Beard pedigree back on a full schedule. There's a returning chef whose reservations book out weeks in advance. There's a new restaurant group's third location and a pizza concept moving in from Orange County. And for the first time in decades, there are two hotels under construction at either end of the boulevard, built specifically to keep dinner tables full on nights the street used to go quiet.

First Fridays haven't stopped either. Food trucks from operators like Cousin's Maine Lobster, Kogi BBQ, and Dogtown Dogs still rotate through monthly, and the boulevard picked up new streetlights earlier this year, small additions that don't make headlines but describe a street being maintained by people who plan to stick around.

The festival's return is worth marking on its own. But the more interesting story is what it's returning to: a boulevard that spent two Septembers without its biggest annual gathering and came out the other side with more reasons to walk it on an ordinary Tuesday.

If you're curious what a changing commercial corridor like Abbot Kinney tends to mean for the residential streets around it, that's the kind of local pattern Ellie Khani tracks closely across Venice and the rest of the Westside. Reach out anytime you want a local read on what's actually shifting in your part of the neighborhood.