The stretch of San Vicente Boulevard between Bundy and 26th has always been Brentwood's front porch. Joggers on the median, coffee at the Country Mart, a coral canopy that has been on the city's Historic-Cultural Monument register since 1976. What is different in the summer of 2026 is the pace of turnover along the storefronts flanking that median, and the quiet arithmetic behind it. The boulevard is trading single-tenant restaurants for multi-concept kitchens, and it is doing so while the city finalizes a $1.2 million median project that legally cannot include a single new tree. The corridor most residents think of as unchanging is, address by address, changing more this year than it has in a decade.
What actually opened, and where
The headline arrival is Neighborly, the multi-restaurant kitchen and marketplace that debuted its Westlake Village original in 2024. The brand put signage up at 11770 San Vicente Boulevard earlier this spring, and opened to the public on Saturday, April 11 at 11:00 a.m. after final sign-offs from the City of Los Angeles. Under one roof and one order, guests can now pull from four separate kitchens: What Gaby's Cooking from cookbook author Gaby Dalkin, Mini Kabob from chef Armen Martirosyan and family, Mixtape from Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, and Palermo Pizza Club from Frank Pinello of Best Pizza in Williamsburg, New York. Mini Kabob has repeatedly appeared on the Los Angeles Times "101 Best Restaurants" list, and Mixtape serves gluten-free, seed-oil-free fried chicken sandwiches and coconut soft-serve. In practical terms, a family that cannot agree on dinner can now file into one door and leave with pizza, kebab wraps, salads, and a burger on the same receipt.
Two blocks east, a second reinvention is under construction. Pérse, a new dining concept, is preparing to open at 11677 San Vicente Boulevard on the third floor of Brentwood Gardens, combining two former office units in a project that Los Angeles City Planning Department filings show was approved for a change of use from office to restaurant. The approval includes a full liquor license and signage plans, though menu details have not been made public.
A few short additions round out the map:
| Address | Concept | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 11770 San Vicente Blvd | Neighborly (Gaby's, Mini Kabob, Mixtape, Palermo Pizza Club) | Opened April 11, 2026 |
| 11677 San Vicente Blvd, 3rd floor | Pérse at Brentwood Gardens | Approved, under construction |
| 906 S Barrington Ave | Savta, hand-roll bar expanded from the Original Farmers Market with combinations like tuna with truffle and jalapeño and uni with caviar and toro | Open |
| Brentwood Village (Barrington Walk) | Terroni, a well-regarded Italian group with multiple Los Angeles locations, preparing to open one of the larger dining establishments in Brentwood | In build-out |
The food-hall math nobody talks about
There is a reason a food hall is the format landing on San Vicente rather than another chef-driven single restaurant. Brentwood's rent per square foot is among the highest on the Westside, and a solo operator carries the full cost of a slow Tuesday. A shared kitchen splits that risk across four brands and lets a landlord backfill office square footage, which is exactly what happened at Brentwood Gardens, where a change of use from office to restaurant converted two dormant suites into a licensed dining floor. The pandemic-era vacancy that hit Westside office product did not disappear; it converted. What residents read as "another new restaurant" is, from the leasing side, a re-tenanting strategy for a corridor whose office demand softened faster than its retail demand.
The consumer version of the same math is simpler. The Neighborly concept lets a family or group of friends who don't want the same thing pick and choose from four different chef-crafted menus, or pick up something for home from the gourmet marketplace's fresh and frozen options. That single line explains why the format is spreading through affluent, walk-in neighborhoods faster than through destination dining districts. Brentwood households eat out on weeknights, together, without a reservation. The old model punished that behavior. The new one is built for it.
A median that cannot be replanted
While the storefronts churn, the median itself is heading into its own reset, and this is where the corridor's contradictions get interesting. The San Vicente median is getting a $1.2 million facelift, with drought-tolerant landscaping, high-efficiency irrigation, and, per city instruction, not a single new tree. The reason is legal, not horticultural. Per StreetsLA, the city cannot plant new trees in the corridor because San Vicente's historic designation requires only coral trees to be planted in the area, and the canopy was designated a Historic-Cultural Monument on March 3, 1976. Many of those trees began to decline more than a decade ago as the city struggled with limited maintenance funding, and only a few original trees remain today, but the historic designation continues to restrict the city from introducing any non-coral species.
The species itself is part of the problem. A Master Arborist certified by the International Society of Arboriculture has described coral trees as a "high maintenance" species, fast-growing with weak wood structure, susceptible to collapse unless pruned regularly, while over-pruning causes them to "sunburn". Roughly 120 large coral trees (Erythrina afra) line the median along its full length, planted after the Pacific Electric Red Car line was pulled in the 1940s.
Local funding tells its own story. The City of Los Angeles provides zero funding for the approximate yearly cost of $30,000 to maintain the trees, which is why the Brentwood Coral Tree Endowment Fund solicits donations from residents directly. As Councilwoman Traci Park put it to the Westside Current, "Brentwood deserves a corridor that reflects the pride people have in this neighborhood," crediting Senator Allan for providing the funding.
The upshot for the person who walks the median every morning: the grass and irrigation will look better within a year, the coral canopy will keep thinning, and the boulevard's most photographed feature is being managed as a legacy asset, not a renewable one.
A Saturday on the boulevard, updated
Here is how the corridor reads for a resident planning a normal weekend in July.
- Morning. Start north of San Vicente for the run on the median. Cross at 26th, where the signal timing is the one place you can reliably get across without a sprint.
- Late morning. Coffee and errands at the Brentwood Country Mart, still anchoring the west end at 26th. The Country Mart sits at 26th and San Vicente, and remains the boulevard's most walkable pocket.
- Lunch. Neighborly at 11770 San Vicente for a table of mixed orders. Households with a picky teenager or a gluten-free adult can, for the first time on this stretch, feed everyone from one counter.
- Afternoon. Hand rolls at Savta on Barrington if the group prefers a sit-down. A weekday lunch special includes an appetizer and three hand rolls for $32, which is the kind of price anchor worth remembering when you are comparing it to the neighborhood's other sushi options.
- Evening. Watch the Brentwood Gardens hoardings for a Pérse opening date. When the full liquor license clears its final inspection, the third-floor space will be one of the few licensed rooftop-adjacent dining floors on this stretch of the boulevard.
- Ongoing. Follow the median greening project through StreetsLA and Council District 11 updates. The residents who show up to those virtual briefings are the ones who end up shaping which drought-tolerant plantings fill the gaps between the remaining coral trees.
What the corridor is telling us
Two things are true about San Vicente this summer, and they are in tension. The retail edge is modernizing quickly, converting office square footage into multi-chef kitchens because that is the only format the math supports at these rents. The median in the middle is frozen by its own monument status, protected from change even as its defining feature slowly disappears. Residents who have lived here for twenty years often describe Brentwood as a place that resists change. The evidence on the ground in 2026 is more specific than that. The parts of the corridor governed by private leases are changing fast. The parts governed by the 1976 designation cannot change at all. Everything the neighborhood will feel like a decade from now is being negotiated between those two facts right now.
If your household is thinking about how these shifts affect the value or use of a home on or near San Vicente, Auburn Properties advises Brentwood owners and buyers with the discretion the corridor is known for. Request a confidential valuation.