Downtown Manhattan Beach Is Turning Over Fast. The New Tenants Tell a Different Story.

Reservations for a restaurant that has not existed in years sold out in twenty-four hours this month. Fonz's, the downtown fixture Danny Boehle and co-founder Dodd, a beach volleyball champion and Olympic medalist from Manhattan Beach, opened in 1997, is staging a five-night pop-up from September 23 through 27 inside Fête by Slay, someone else's restaurant. Boehle bought Dodd out in 2005 and sold the place in 2017. Now the old crew is coming back for one week to serve the meatloaf again, and half of downtown apparently wanted a seat before the news had finished spreading.

That single pop-up is a good entry point into something bigger. Downtown Manhattan Beach has been through the fastest stretch of storefront change most people can remember, and the shape of that change is not what a quick walk down the boulevard would suggest.

Kelly Stroman Has Never Seen It Move This Fast

Kelly Stroman runs the Downtown Manhattan Beach Business and Professionals Association, which means she gets the calls when a lease falls through or a new tenant signs. Asked to characterize the past six months, she put it plainly: the turnover in downtown Manhattan Beach is unprecedented right now and we are all talking about it.

The list backs her up. Since the start of the year, downtown has seen closures, relocations, and new leases stacking up faster than the neighborhood typically absorbs them:

• Ocean View Cafe closed, and Alfred Coffee signed the lease to take its place
• Gum Tree, the longtime local boutique and café, lost its previous lease and is relocating to a smaller space nearby
• Beyond Yoga is set to open in Gum Tree's old, larger footprint
• Peet's Coffee gave way to Blank Street Coffee
• Lemonade's former space at Metlox was approved for Sogna Toscana, a lifestyle cafe from an Italian import brand
• Gelato & Angels was replaced by Velvet by Graham & Spencer
• Pitfire Pizza's old spot is becoming Great White, an Australian-inspired cafe already established in Venice
• Harry's Cleaners closed with no new tenant announced
• Pressed Juicery closed, though the association says there have been multiple expressions of interest in the space

Read as a list, it looks like ordinary churn. Read as a pattern, it looks like something more specific.

The Independent Shops Are the Ones Losing Ground

Look at what is actually leaving and what is actually arriving, not just the raw count of openings and closings. Ocean View Cafe, a single, independently run spot, is being replaced by Alfred Coffee, a Los Angeles chain with multiple locations across the city. Gum Tree, a local boutique brand built over years in one space, is shrinking into a smaller storefront while Beyond Yoga, a multi-location apparel brand, moves into the square footage it left behind. Sogna Toscana isn't a first-time restaurant bet by a local entrepreneur. It's the sixth Tuscan-inspired lifestyle cafe from an Italian import company that already knows exactly what this concept looks like in five other cities.

None of this is a story about downtown Manhattan Beach losing appeal. Assessed property values in the city grew again on the 2026 annual roll, and a market that couldn't support new leases wouldn't be attracting brands with this many other addresses to choose from. The story is about who has the balance sheet to sign a lease right now. A single-location cafe owner is negotiating a new term against inflation and a competitive rent roll with one location's cash flow behind them. A brand with five or six locations is negotiating with five or six locations' worth of leverage. In a turnover cycle this fast, that difference decides who gets the space.

Ounce of Salt Is the Exception That Proves It

Not every new name downtown fits the pattern, which is exactly why the exception is worth naming. Ounce of Salt, a jewelry store from local owner Jen Baick, opened in the former Rolling Hills Flower Mart space on Manhattan Avenue. It's a single owner taking a single storefront, the kind of lease downtown used to fill more often. It is also, notably, one of the smaller spaces on this list, tucked into a flower shop's old footprint rather than a corner restaurant lease. The independent businesses are still finding room downtown. They are finding it in smaller rooms.

The Food Festival Just Moved Into a Hotel

The same shift shows up one level up, in how downtown's signature food event is now produced. Manhattan Beach Food & Wine is holding its third annual event on September 25 and 26, and for the first time, it's not staged along the boulevard. Founder and producer Shelby Russell and culinary host Chef Neal Fraser moved the two-night tasting celebration to Westdrift Manhattan Beach, the hotel, with sponsors that include Delta Air Lines, San Pellegrino, and Sub-Zero. The event still benefits a good cause, the Culinary Careers Program, and it still draws in roughly two dozen chefs and restaurants. But it now runs inside a hotel's event infrastructure instead of on the street where the restaurants themselves operate. That's not a criticism of the festival. It's the same pattern showing up in event production that's showing up in retail leasing: the version of downtown that gets built out fastest right now is the one with institutional backing behind it.

What's Still Up in the Air

Not every space downtown has landed somewhere yet. Parakeet Cafe, slated for the former Cafe Altamura location, has been delayed with no opening date set. The former Beehive and Forma pop-up space still has no tenant identified. The combined Bardot Salon and Corpo Bonito space, renovated into a single unit, is sitting empty while a lease gets worked out. Drift Beach Club closed in June and hasn't been replaced. Downtown right now is genuinely in transition, not settled into whatever it becomes next.

What This Looks Like on a Walk Down the Boulevard

Walk Manhattan Beach Boulevard this week and you'll pass a French bistro, Coucou, that opened in the old Nando Trattoria space and is already known in Venice and West Hollywood. You'll pass Bacio di Latte, a gelato shop now open and drawing a line most afternoons. You'll pass a smaller Gum Tree storefront and, a few doors down, the Beyond Yoga taking over its old one. And for five nights this week, if you got a reservation in time, you can walk into Fête by Slay and eat Fonz's meatloaf again, cooked by people who used to cook it there for real, in a building that isn't theirs, for a run that ends Sunday and won't be extended.

That's downtown Manhattan Beach in September 2026. Still full, still busy, still worth the walk. Just increasingly run by people with more than one address.

If you're weighing what any of this means for a home or investment in downtown Manhattan Beach, that's a conversation worth having directly. Lisa Moule Realty works this stretch of the South Bay block by block, and schedule your South Bay consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.