Downtown Manhattan Beach New Restaurants and Shops: The Shift Behind Them
October 1, 2026
October 1, 2026
Reservations for a restaurant that has not existed in years sold out in twenty-four hours ahead of its September pop-up. Fonz's, the downtown fixture Danny Boehle and co-founder Dodd, a beach volleyball champion and Olympic medalist from Manhattan Beach, opened in 1997, staged 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. The old crew came back for one week to serve the meatloaf again, and half of downtown apparently wanted a seat before the news had finished spreading.
The pop-up is one of several recent changes to downtown Manhattan Beach's storefront mix.
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:
Together, the list shows a mix of independent businesses and multi-location brands changing places downtown.
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.
Assessed property values in the city grew again on the 2026 annual roll. The tenant changes include both single-location businesses and brands with multiple locations. A single-location cafe owner negotiates a new term with one location's cash flow behind them, while a brand with five or six locations negotiates with the resources of five or six locations. The list shows both types of businesses in downtown's changing tenant mix.
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.
Downtown's signature food event also changed venues. Manhattan Beach Food & Wine held its third annual event on September 25 and 26, and for the first time, it was 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 benefited the Culinary Careers Program and drew in roughly two dozen chefs and restaurants. But it ran inside a hotel's event infrastructure instead of on the street where the restaurants themselves operate.
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.
A walk down Manhattan Beach Boulevard that week would have taken you past a French bistro, Coucou, that had opened in the old Nando Trattoria space and was already known in Venice and West Hollywood. You would have passed Bacio di Latte, a gelato shop open and drawing a line most afternoons. You would have passed a smaller Gum Tree storefront and, a few doors down, the Beyond Yoga taking over its old one. For five nights that week, if you got a reservation in time, you could 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 wasn't theirs, for a run that ended Sunday.
That's downtown Manhattan Beach in September 2026. Still full, still busy, still worth the walk. The storefronts reflect a downtown still changing block by block.
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.
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