The New Restaurants on Manhattan Avenue Are Opening Where a Four-Year Sidewalk Fight Just Ended

Walk the west side of Manhattan Avenue between Center Place and Manhattan Beach Boulevard this month and you'll pass three restaurants that didn't exist there two years ago. Coucou has burgundy leather banquettes and Calacatta marble where Nando Trattoria used to serve Sicilian pasta. A few doors down, Bread Head is slicing focaccia sandwiches in the space Tacolicious left behind. If you've lived here long enough to remember 2024, this block should feel familiar for a different reason. It's the same stretch of sidewalk the city council spent an entire meeting arguing over before rejecting a modest plan to let those very restaurants put a few tables outside.

That vote didn't kill the restaurants. But it's worth understanding what changed between then and now, because it explains something about this fall's restaurant wave that a simple "here's what's new" list won't tell you.

The Pilot That Got Voted Down

In October 2024, the city council considered a scaled-back pilot program that would have extended the sidewalks in front of three Manhattan Avenue restaurants, Dash Dashi, Tacolicious, and Nando Trattoria, using low-cost modular platforms instead of permanent construction. The estimated price tag was $136,605. The council rejected it the same night it approved demolishing the aging Parking Lot 3 structure, a 146-space garage that needed to come down regardless. With the city suddenly facing a real infrastructure bill and a temporary loss of downtown parking, spending six figures on removable sidewalk decking for three restaurants stopped looking like a priority.

Tacolicious and Nando Trattoria are both gone now. Neither closure has been tied publicly to that vote, and plenty of restaurants change hands for reasons that have nothing to do with sidewalk seating. But the timing is hard to ignore. The two storefronts most associated with Manhattan Beach's outdoor dining stalemate are the two that turned over, and what replaced them, Coucou and Bread Head, arrived after the city finally settled the question those restaurants never got an answer to.

Four Years, One Rejected Vision, One Quiet Ordinance

The outdoor dining debate in Manhattan Beach didn't start in 2024. It traces back to the pandemic-era program that let restaurants build dining decks in public parking spaces, a setup residents and business owners genuinely liked. When the state of emergency ended in February 2023, the decks came down, and the city formed a 15-member task force to figure out something permanent.

By February 2024, the task force had produced an ambitious vision: widened sidewalks by four to eight feet throughout downtown and North Manhattan Beach, plus reconfigured parking. When the cost estimates came back that April, they landed between $7.5 million and $12 million for the sidewalks and dining areas alone, with another $8 million to redo the city's signature blue tile inlays. The full project could have run close to $20 million, and the council never found a clean way to pay for it.

By March 2025, the council had abandoned the infrastructure ambitions entirely and told staff to focus only on updating the rules for outdoor dining as it already existed on the ground. Eight months later, in November 2025, that narrower approach became a real ordinance. No sidewalk widening, no new construction, just a clear set of operational standards and a fee schedule.

"I want to know what this is going to cost and how we are going to pay for it."

That line came from then-councilmember Steve Napolitano during the 2024 debate over the $20 million vision. It's a fair question, and it's the one that ultimately killed the ambitious version of this plan. What passed a year and a half later was smaller, cheaper, and unanimous, with no recorded opposition, a sharp contrast to the walk-street fights and resident pushback that had defined the process up to that point.

What a Patio Costs Now

The ordinance sets different rates depending on where in town a restaurant sits, and whether it's serving alcohol outside.

The tiered structure came from a council member's observation that foot traffic in North Manhattan Beach doesn't match downtown, largely because of parking, so charging both districts the same rate would have hit the North End harder. The ordinance also set rules for second-floor dining that hadn't existed before in one place: no facing residential uses, a 15-foot setback, sound attenuation, and no music or live entertainment on upper floors.

None of this requires a new sidewalk or a task force vote. A restaurant applies, pays the per-square-foot fee, and follows the standards. That's the entire mechanism now.

Coucou's Timing Tells the Story

Here's the detail that ties it together. Coucou's own use permit amendment for 1131 Manhattan Avenue went before the city's Planning Commission on December 10, 2025, about three weeks after the council adopted the new ordinance. Nando Trattoria, at that same address, had been one of the three restaurants named in the rejected 2024 pilot. Coucou didn't inherit a sidewalk fight. It inherited a finished rulebook.

That's the real difference between this restaurant class and the one it replaced. Nando spent its last active years operating under a program that no longer existed and a permanent one that hadn't been written yet. Coucou opened into certainty. Whatever outdoor seating you see in front of these new restaurants this fall reflects an actual fee schedule and a set of standards, not a pandemic leftover or a stalled proposal.

The Rest of Metlox Filled In Too

Coucou isn't opening alone. A few blocks away at Metlox, the mixed-use development on the 400 block of Manhattan Beach Boulevard, an Italian gelato counter moved into a storefront there this summer, and a Venice-based all-day café took over the space a pizza concept had vacated, opening its sixth location on July 31 with breakfast service running until 3 p.m. and a wood-fired pizza and fish taco menu carrying through dinner. Over in Manhattan Village, a hospitality group best known for restaurants in Long Beach and Topanga opened its first South Bay location on July 21, a modern American concept with a social hour running from 3 to 6 p.m. and brunch service on weekends.

Every one of these openings, from Metlox to Manhattan Village to Manhattan Avenue, is operating under the same ordinance that took effect in November. That's not a coincidence of timing so much as a function of it. Restaurant buildouts take months of permitting, and this entire wave was moving through city review right as the outdoor dining rules were finally settling into something predictable.

The Season Around It

This new restaurant cluster is landing right before the part of the year when downtown gets its biggest foot traffic. The Manhattan Beach Hometown Fair takes over downtown October 3 and 4, running 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. both days. The Family Halloween Carnival follows on October 24 at Manhattan Heights Park, and Pier Lighting closes out the season on November 18, when Downtown Manhattan Beach turns on its holiday lights for an evening of music and shopping around the pier.

Line those dates up against the restaurant openings and the pattern is straightforward. Anyone walking from Metlox toward the pier for the Hometown Fair in early October will pass Coucou, the gelato counter, and the new café along the way, all of them now operating under sidewalk rules that simply didn't exist the last time this same stretch hosted the fair.

That's the actual story of Manhattan Beach's fall season this year. Not just what's new to eat, but the fact that for the first time since the pandemic decks came down, a new restaurant here doesn't open with an outdoor dining question mark attached to it.

If you're weighing what any of this means for property near Metlox or downtown, or you're curious how a changing retail corridor shows up in home values on the surrounding blocks, that's the kind of question worth a real conversation rather than a guess. Ellie Khani has spent years reading these Westside and South Bay corridors block by block, and welcomes a call whenever you're ready to talk through what a specific address is actually worth in today's market.