"The big thing we need to get residents back is this," Pacific Palisades resident Jacklyn Chernov said on August 15, standing outside the Palisades Village ribbon cutting. "To have community, to have coffee and restaurants."
She got her coffee and restaurants back that Saturday. What she got was not quite what left nineteen months earlier.
The reopening, in one weekend
Palisades Village closed the day the January 2025 wildfire tore through the community, and it stayed closed through more than $100 million in restoration and environmental remediation, according to NBC Los Angeles. Crews stripped several buildings to their studs, treated the wood, and rebuilt walls before racing through final inspections this summer. The doors opened again on Saturday, August 15, with a ribbon cutting at 10:30 a.m., stores and restaurants opening at 11, and a full day of retailer events, tastings, and family activities running until 8 p.m., according to Beverly Press & Park Labrea News. Complimentary parking runs through September 30.
Rick Caruso, whose company developed the center when it originally opened in 2018, called the reopening "a comeback story for the history books." By his own account the Village came back close to full: 99 percent leased, with the majority of prior tenants returning alongside a deliberately curated set of newcomers, per Beverly Press. That headline number is the part every outlet covered. The part worth sitting with is what "99 percent leased" is actually made of.
Back, reworked, new, and gone
Not every returning name came back the same way it left, and not every name that left came back at all. Reporting from WWD and NBC Los Angeles, taken together, sketches four different categories inside that one leasing figure.
| Category | Examples |
|---|---|
| Back, largely as it was | Loomey's Toys, K Bakery, Erewhon |
| Back, but reworked | Blue Ribbon Sushi (new omakase counter, redesigned patio), Buck Mason (expanded footprint, added café concept), elysewalker (relocated to a larger space at Sunset and Swarthmore) |
| New to the property | Spacca Tutto, LESET, Xirena, Violet Grey, Alphabet Bar & Grill |
| Did not return | Aerin, Aesop, Lululemon, Saint Laurent |
Nancy Silverton's Spacca Tutto is the anchor everyone is watching, an Italian-American steakhouse and the chef's first restaurant on the Westside. LESET, the elevated-basics label founded by Lili Chemla in 2019, is opening its first West Coast store here rather than in Santa Monica or Brentwood. Xirena, the California-aesthetic label launched in 2013, is opening its first standalone location anywhere. None of these three had a footprint in the Palisades before the fire. All three chose it now.
Then there is Mother, whose founders had inventory loaded into a standalone Palisades store days before it was set to open in January 2025. The fire took the space before a single customer walked in. Cofounder Tim Kaeding told WWD the brand wasn't going to let that stop it, and Mother is opening at the Village instead, its first attempt finished a year and a half later than planned.
One restaurant came back loud. One came back quiet.
The contrast that says the most about who this reopening is actually for sits between two chefs on the same property. Silverton's Spacca Tutto arrived with the full press rollout: James Beard pedigree, a new-to-market concept, coverage in national trade outlets weeks before the doors opened. Gino Angelini, reopening his longtime Angelini Ristorante & Bar at the same center, has taken the opposite approach, choosing to bring the restaurant back without fanfare out of consideration for residents still working through their own recoveries.
That is not an accident of timing. It is two different operators reading the same room and drawing opposite conclusions about what residents need from a reopening: one a reason to celebrate, the other permission to just quietly have their neighborhood restaurant back.
The corner that didn't get a ribbon cutting
Palisades Village was spared structural loss in the fire. The commercial block across the street from it was not. The Ralphs that anchored daily errands near the Village is not returning on the same timeline as the shopping center, and no firm construction date has been set for it. Erewhon, operating inside the Village as the anchor grocer, is absorbing some of that foot traffic, but a lifestyle grocer built around prepared foods and juice bars does not replace a full-size supermarket for a household doing its weekly shop.
CVS Pharmacy was the first major retailer to reopen in the Palisades at all, back in November, well before any part of the Village welcomed customers again. In the months between the fire and the Village reopening, the businesses actually serving daily foot traffic in the flats have mostly been the ones catering to construction crews and residents managing rebuilds: a hardware store, a bank branch, a handful of independently owned restaurants, and a small cafe that became the default meeting spot for anyone still in the neighborhood on a given afternoon. That is the commercial ecosystem the Village reopened into. A single shopping center coming back at close to full occupancy is a real milestone. It is not the same as the surrounding commercial corridor being whole again.
Three miles up the coast, the churn looks different
None of this retail rewriting is confined to the fire zone. On Abbot Kinney, the Venice boulevard that has spent three decades trading storefronts as fast as any strip in the city, Bombas opened its first Los Angeles store on August 21 at 1327 Abbot Kinney Boulevard, according to Santa Monica Daily Press. It is the comfort-apparel brand's fifth physical store nationwide and its first outside the New York location that opened last fall.
Bombas built its opening around the same one-purchased-one-donated model that funds its wholesale business, and the company has already started building relationships with Safe Place for Youth and The Midnight Mission, two organizations serving people experiencing hardship on the Westside. It gave the first 150 customers through the door an exclusive Los Angeles-themed sock. The company currently works with 434 giving partners across California, 67 of them within 15 miles of the new Venice location.
Nobody had to rebuild anything on Abbot Kinney for Bombas to move in. A boulevard that already turns over its storefronts through ordinary retail expansion is doing so at the same moment a few miles south a shopping center is doing it through disaster recovery. Different mechanisms, same outcome: the businesses a Westside resident associates with a given block are not fixed, and this particular August is proof of it twice over.
What's actually on the calendar now
Beyond the opening weekend, Palisades Village has started rolling out a regular slate of free community programming, according to the Palisadian-Post:
- Mahjong Social, Mondays, 10 a.m. to noon
- Rummikub Social, first Tuesday of every month, 6 to 7:30 p.m.
- Pacific Palisades Farmers Market, Wednesdays, 1:30 to 5:30 p.m.
- Cars & Coffee, fourth Sunday of every month, starting at 8 a.m.
These are small, recurring, and unglamorous compared to a Silverton restaurant, and that is exactly the point. A shopping center can announce a celebrity chef in a press release. A standing Wednesday farmers market and a Monday mahjong table are what turn a rebuilt storefront back into a place where you actually run into your neighbor.
Whether it is Spacca Tutto's reservation list or the folding table at Rummikub night, the Village that reopened this month is being built in real time by which of these habits residents actually adopt, not by the leasing percentage on opening day.
If you are watching what any of this means for a property on the Alphabet Streets, in the Riviera, or anywhere else on the Westside still working through its own recovery timeline, NewMarket Homes LA has been tracking this rebuild block by block. Reach out any time you want a second set of local eyes on what's actually changing around you.
