The Real Trade Happening in Downtown Santa Monica This Year

Brittania Pub poured pints in downtown Santa Monica for 30 years. This past July, it closed. A Taco Bell Cantina is taking its place.

A short walk away on the Third Street Promenade, Anthropologie made the opposite move. On June 1, the store closed its longtime spot at 1402 Third Street Promenade and reopened at the Waterside shopping center in Marina del Rey. Same season, same downtown, opposite direction.

Over on Main Street, a different pattern has taken hold. Circle Bar, the neighborhood's nearly 80-year-old round bar, reopened this year after three dark years, brought back by the owners of Hinano Cafe with its original neon sign intact. A husband-and-wife restaurant group opened their sixth location, and their first in Santa Monica, on Main Street in August. A few blocks south on Ocean Park Boulevard, a Peruvian kitchen called PonTu took over the longtime home of OP Cafe.

None of this is random. It is the visible result of a choice the city made about which kind of business it wants to subsidize, and which kind it is letting the market decide on its own.

The city picked restaurants

In March 2026, the Santa Monica City Council unanimously approved an eight-point economic development toolkit as part of its Realignment Plan. The centerpiece is a $3 million fund aimed almost entirely at restaurants: incentives to attract new ones, grants for tenant improvements, and faster permitting for anyone trying to convert an empty retail space into a place to eat.

The most concrete piece of that plan is a fee. Before this year, opening a new restaurant in Santa Monica meant paying a $1,000-per-seat wastewater capacity fee, a cost that could hit $70,000 for a fifty-seat dining room before a single burner was lit. The council eliminated the city's portion of that fee for new and expanding restaurants. Parking got cheaper too: 90 minutes downtown now costs $1.

The city also widened its Entertainment Zone, the program that lets people carry a drink from a participating business onto the sidewalk. It debuted on the Third Street Promenade in June 2025 as Southern California's first zone of its kind. It now extends, on an event-by-event basis, across the entire downtown core, the Santa Monica Pier, Main Street and Montana Avenue. And in August 2025, the city permanently lifted its longstanding ban on chain restaurants, a rule it had already suspended in 2023 amid pandemic-era vacancies.

Put those pieces together and the message is direct. If you are a restaurant, and increasingly if you are a national restaurant brand, Santa Monica just made it measurably cheaper and faster to open here than it was two years ago.

Retail got no equivalent package. That is worth sitting with when you look at what just left the Promenade.

What that trade looks like on the ground

The Promenade's problem was never really about restaurants. It has been a retail street trying to survive online shopping, and the city's response has been to make it easier for food and beverage tenants to backfill the space that department stores and apparel chains keep vacating. Anthropologie's move is a data point in that pattern, not an outlier. A national retailer looked at its Promenade lease and its Marina del Rey option and chose Marina del Rey, even as the city next door was making it cheaper than ever to open a restaurant a few blocks away.

Main Street, by contrast, is filling in without any of that machinery. Circle Bar came back because a nearby cafe owner wanted it back, not because of a fee waiver. The new restaurant on Main Street belongs to a family whose other five locations gave them the capital and confidence to plant a flag in Santa Monica specifically, and its owner said as much when he told local reporters he came because he believes in Main Street as one of Southern California's great neighborhoods. PonTu picked up the lease at a longtime, well-loved address rather than a newly incentivized one.

Richard Lang, a longtime Santa Monica bookstore owner, told the Santa Monica Observer he worries the Promenade's restaurant push could mean the street ends up losing what made it special in the first place. Main Street's Business Improvement Association director, Hunter Hall, described a different mood entirely, telling CBS Los Angeles that his corridor is doing more events than it ever has and drawing more sponsor interest than ever.

Two streets, two economies, two very different reasons for the energy each one has right now.

The city is watching Main Street too

The clearest sign that City Hall notices the difference is where it chose to hold its own celebration of itself. On July 23, 2026, Mayor Caroline Torosis delivered the State of the City address not on the Promenade, but on Main Street between Hollister Avenue and Ocean Park Boulevard, outside the newly reopened Ocean Park Branch Library. Torosis told the crowd that Santa Monica is on stronger footing than it has been in years and framed the choice of location as deliberate, saying the city's future gets built in neighborhoods like that one.

The same event previewed what is coming to the Pier this winter. Fever, the events company behind pop-up experiences in cities worldwide, is opening a European-style holiday market on the Pier's parking deck in late November, running through January 2027. It is a different kind of bet than the restaurant incentives: rather than subsidizing a storefront, the city is importing a seasonal destination and hoping it pulls both locals and visitors back onto the Pier during the slowest months of the year.

There is more programming stacked on top of that. A Goldenvoice-produced music festival is set for September 2026, the first in what the city expects to become an annual event. Downtown had already spent five weeks this summer, from June 11 through July 19, hosting an open-streets FIFA World Cup activation, part of a package that included a $250,000 Metro grant for the World Cup activation and a separate $500,000 Metro grant the city is holding in reserve for a future Olympic Games event. Between the World Cup activation, the coming Goldenvoice festival and the holiday market, this is shaping up to be the busiest calendar year downtown has had in some time.

Meanwhile, on the Promenade itself, the most visible new construction has nothing to do with restaurants or festivals. Crews are erecting the steel framing for Santa Monica's new Digital Display District, with the first two large-scale digital billboards going up on the 1200 block near Wilshire Boulevard and Arizona Avenue. Under the ordinance the city approved, each display up to 1,000 square feet carries a one-time $500,000 community benefit contribution and an annual payment equal to the greater of 20 percent of gross advertising revenue or a $500,000 minimum guarantee. If all 16 approved displays across the Promenade and Santa Monica Place go active, the city estimates the program could generate between $3.5 million and $7 million a year, a new revenue stream the Promenade is expected to help fund even as its own storefronts sit vacant.

What this means if you already live here

None of this requires a decision from you. It just explains what you are seeing when you walk the two corridors this fall. The Promenade is being rebuilt around restaurants, events and now advertising revenue, funded by the city and aimed at filling space a struggling retail model left behind. Main Street is filling in on its own terms, one operator at a time, without a fund behind it.

Both streets are more active than they were two years ago. They just got there through completely different mechanisms, and that is worth knowing the next time someone tells you downtown Santa Monica is either dying or thriving. It is doing both, on different blocks, for different reasons.

If you want a closer look at how these shifts are showing up in specific pockets of the city, from Ocean Park to the neighborhoods above Montana Avenue, our guide to Santa Monica's residential enclaves breaks down how each one connects to what is happening downtown.

For everything else happening across the Westside this season, Amy Um and her team keep a close eye on the details that actually change daily life here, not just the ones that make headlines.