The Abbot Kinney Festival returns on September 27 for its 40th edition, after sitting out 2024 and 2025 entirely. Every write-up so far has treated this the same way: the neighborhood's biggest tradition is finally back. That's true, but it skips a stranger fact. A real share of the storefronts you'll be walking past that Sunday have never seen this event happen at all.
Think about what that means in practice. RVR, Salud, the reopened Tasting Kitchen, BADMAASH's third Venice outpost, Bodega + Palms in the old Mitchell's Market space. None of them existed in their current form the last time an actual Abbot Kinney Festival took place. For the longtime shops and restaurants on the boulevard, September 27 is a comeback. For a good chunk of what's opened since, it's a first day of school.
A Sunday Older Than Most of the Menus Around It
The festival traces back to September 1984, when it started as a way to showcase local artisans and raise money for Venice nonprofits. The Spirit of Venice Award, handed out most years since 1989, was first given to descendants of Abbot Kinney himself, the same year the street was renamed in his honor from West Washington Boulevard. Over four decades, the nonprofit Abbot Kinney Festival Association has put more than $300,000 back into local youth, arts, and civic programs. One of the more specific grants on record: $1,700 in 2016 to the Venice Japanese American Memorial Monument Committee, to help print curriculum about the World War II internment history tied to the corner where Venice's Japanese American residents were once ordered to report. This isn't a street fair dressed up as tradition. It funds an actual piece of the neighborhood's civic memory.
Organizers pulled the plug in both 2024 and 2025, citing a sponsorship slowdown that hit festivals across the country, and used the gap to restructure. In its earlier form, the one-day event drew crowds estimated somewhere between 120,000 and 150,000 people along a single mile of boulevard, with vendor counts cited anywhere from 300 to 350 booths, several music stages, and three beer gardens. The exact numbers move depending on who's counting, but the shape of it doesn't: this is, by a wide margin, the single busiest day Abbot Kinney sees all year.
Two Years Off, But Nobody Told the Boulevard to Wait
Here's the part that gets lost in the comeback framing. The corridor didn't sit still during the hiatus. It kept adding restaurants, retail, and infrastructure at a pace that outstripped the festival's own return.
Chef Travis Lett reopened in the old MTN space at 1305 Abbot Kinney with RVR in the fall of 2024, his first project since selling his stake in the Gjelina Group and stepping away from restaurants for close to five years. Salud opened at 417 Washington Boulevard in January 2026, splitting its day between Latin-inspired coffee service in the morning and a mezcal and tapas program at night, and drew roughly 100 locals to a Venice Chamber of Commerce mixer within its first two months. The Tasting Kitchen, the restaurant that helped launch Abbot Kinney's dining reputation back in 2009, came back to 1633 Abbot Kinney on July 16, 2026, with founding chef Casey Lane back in the kitchen and the original olive tree still standing at the center of the dining room. BADMAASH, the Los Angeles Indian restaurant group started in 2013 by brothers Nakul and Arjun Mahendro, added a third location on the boulevard, its dark, moody dining room built around a back bar and an art piece from Action Bronson. Bodega + Palms took over the space long occupied by Mitchell's Market and turned it into a corner store stocked with sunscreen, coffee, and prepared food from local kitchens.
Truly Pizza, the Dana Point pizzeria known for its three-day fermented dough, has committed to a third location at 1239 Abbot Kinney seating close to 130 people, but its debut isn't slated until later this year. Depending on timing, it may not even be serving its first pie by the 27th.
Then there's the construction. Two boutique hotels, the first built new in Venice in decades, are rising at opposite ends of the boulevard. Venice Place, a 78-room project at the north end designed by local architect David Hertz, will anchor around Felix Trattoria. At the corner of Abbot Kinney and Main, the 43-room 881 Abbot Kinney sits on a lot that once belonged to former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Both were targeted for completion sometime in the 2025 to 2026 window. Neither has had a chance to operate through a full festival cycle either.
Who's Actually Done This Before
Line it up and the split is clearer than the celebratory version of this story suggests.
Has worked a festival Sunday before: Gjelina, open since 2008 and still the boulevard's reference point for what a Venice restaurant is supposed to feel like. Felix Trattoria, open since 2016 and named the best new restaurant in America by Esquire the following year. The boutiques and cafes that have quietly anchored the street for a decade or more.
Has never worked one: RVR. Salud. The reopened Tasting Kitchen, under its current design and staff. BADMAASH's Venice location. Bodega + Palms. Possibly Truly Pizza, and possibly both hotels, depending on how construction timelines land relative to the 27th.
That's not a small list. It's most of what people mean when they talk about Abbot Kinney's comeback.
What a Festival Sunday Actually Requires
For residents who haven't lived through one of these before, or haven't in a while, the practical shape of the day is worth knowing.
The festival runs 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. along the full length of Abbot Kinney between Venice Boulevard and Main Street. Parking tightens for the whole weekend before, not just Sunday. Public lots include one at Westminster Elementary School on Main Street, between Brooks and Westminster. Free bike valet stations are set up at both ends of the route, and one of the three beer gardens requires a wristband for anyone 21 and older.
If your home fronts the boulevard or sits within a couple of blocks, plan errands and dog walks around the closure window rather than through it.
The Actual Test on the 27th
For the businesses that have been here since before 2023, this is a reunion. For everything that opened in between, it's the first real evidence of whether the boulevard they signed a lease on can handle the crowd it used to draw before the pause. Abbot Kinney has been running close to fully leased through the hiatus, filling in gaps with a specific kind of operator: chefs with real résumés choosing Venice over more obvious neighborhoods, a Latin concept that plugged into the Chamber of Commerce within weeks of opening, and hotel projects finally moving after more than a decade in entitlement limbo. What nobody has actually seen yet is what happens when 120,000 or more people move through that same lineup in a single day.
Residents walking the boulevard on the 27th will get to watch that answer arrive in real time, before anyone writes the retrospective about it.
If you live in Venice, you already know this street changes on its own schedule, festival or not. If you're weighing a move here and want a local read on how a neighborhood like this actually works day to day, not just what the listing photos show, the Mitch Bassett team is based on the Westside and happy to talk through it. No pressure, just local knowledge.
