"It's great because now there's a lot of new spaces for businesses to move into," a Brentwood high schooler told the Harvard-Westlake Chronicle this spring, describing the wave of storefronts filling in around the Village. He wasn't wrong. Between January and April of this year, nine new shops opened along the stretch of Brentwood between San Vicente Boulevard and the Country Mart. But in the same breath, he pointed at the other half of the story: older businesses closing because landlords keep raising rent. Both things are true at once, and neither explains what's actually happening.
Here's the part the quick "look what's new" post misses. Brentwood isn't having one retail boom right now. It's having two, layered on top of each other, and they run on completely different timelines. One is a group of national brands making permanent bets on this specific stretch of the Westside. The other is a temporary shelter for businesses burned out of the Palisades in January 2025, some of which are already packing up to go home.
The Village's New Tenants, By Name
The seven storefronts that opened in the Village by April were Pop Up Bagels, Great White, Go Greek, Neighborly, Ggiata, Paliskates, and Flour Pizzeria and Cafe. Two more, Layla's Bagels and Community Goods, were expected to follow within the month.
Great White, the Venice-born all-day café known for grain bowls and fish tacos, landed at 11660 Darlington Avenue. Neighborly opened April 2 at 11754 S. San Vicente Boulevard as a multi-concept food hall, and the roster inside is the kind of detail that gets lost in a generic roundup: Palermo Pizza Club is run by Frank Pinello, the Brooklyn pizza maker behind Best Pizza in Williamsburg. Gaby's comes from Gaby Dalkin, a two-time New York Times bestselling cookbook author. Mixtape is a burger and chicken tenders concept from Questlove. Mini Kabob, the Mediterranean grill from the Martirosyan family, has landed on the LA Times "101 Best Restaurants" list more than once.
That's not a random assortment of tenants. It's a food hall that recruited people with existing audiences, which is a different kind of bet than a neighborhood coffee shop testing a new corner.
What's Actually Permanent
A few blocks away at the Country Mart, the calculus is even clearer. Varley, the women's activewear label, opened its first Los Angeles County store there this summer, describing it as a return to where the brand's founders spent years building both a business and a family. It's one of only three California locations Varley has, alongside Fashion Island in Newport Beach and a Marin Country Mart store that opened weeks later, on July 26.
Orlebar Brown opened at the Mart on June 12, its fourth California store after Beverly Hills, Newport Beach, and Montecito.
None of this is coincidence dressed up as coincidence. The Brentwood Country Mart, Montecito Country Mart, and Marin Country Mart are all owned by the same company, J.S. Rosenfield and Co., which also owns the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica. When a brand picks Brentwood, it's often picking a formula that landlord has already run successfully in two other small, wealthy enclaves. That's the kind of tenant that signs a real lease and plans to stay.
Compare that to Paliskates, the skate shop that relocated to the Country Mart area after the Palisades fire destroyed its original location. The owner told the Chronicle the choice was deliberate: the Country Mart area still has a village feel. But she also said the new storefront is a downsize, curated to fit a smaller footprint, and that she's planning to expand again once she can get back to the Palisades. That's a business using Brentwood as a bridge, not a destination.
Flour Pizzeria and Cafe reads differently. Founder Robert Flutie lost his original Palisades location in the fires and chose Brentwood for the next one after studying the market and deciding the neighborhood's family feel fit what he wanted to build. Nothing in his comments suggests he's waiting to move back. Two businesses, same fire, same relocation story, opposite plans for whether Brentwood is temporary or home.
The Sunday Market Is Already Shrinking Back
The clearest sign that some of this newness has an expiration date is happening on your own street, not in a storefront.
After the Palisades fire, the Pacific Palisades Farmers Market merged with the Brentwood Farmers Market, expanding the Sunday footprint along San Vicente Boulevard from Gretna Green Way all the way to Bundy Drive to fit the extra vendors. For over a year, that expanded market was the version most Brentwood residents knew.
That's already changing. With Palisades Village reopening on August 15, the Palisades Farmers Market has returned to its original home on Swarthmore Avenue, after 19 months away, but on a new day. It's now a Wednesday afternoon market instead of the Sunday slot it held before the fire.
| During displacement | As of late August 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| Location | Merged into Brentwood, San Vicente Blvd | Back on Swarthmore Ave, Pacific Palisades |
| Day | Sunday, same as Brentwood's market | Wednesday afternoon |
| Brentwood impact | Extra vendors, extra foot traffic | Sunday footprint contracts back toward its original size |
If Sunday mornings at the Brentwood market have felt busier and more crowded than they used to be, that's why. And if this fall's market feels a little more like it did before January 2025, that's not your imagination either. The two communities spent a year and a half sharing a Sunday, and that arrangement is now ending on its own timeline, not because anyone announced it as news.
What Stays the Same Through All of It
Not everything at the Country Mart is in flux. The Friday Movie Night series has run through the summer without interruption, working through a Pixar lineup that continues into fall: Toy Story on September 4, Finding Nemo on September 11, and Up on September 18. The format hasn't changed in years. Grab dinner from one of the Mart's restaurants, bring a low chair, and watch a movie in the courtyard.
Diesel, A Bookstore keeps a similarly steady rhythm, with weekly Wednesday storytime for kids and evening author events that have drawn names like Jessica Knoll and Victoria Aveyard this year. That calendar isn't tied to the fire recovery or the retail cycle. It's just what the bookstore does, and it's been doing it since it opened at the Mart.
That contrast is the actual takeaway. The Village's churn (new bagel shops, a skate store that might leave again, rents pushing out older tenants) is real, but it's the volatile layer. The Mart's national retail bets and its recurring programming are the stable layer underneath it. If you're trying to guess what Brentwood looks like a year from now, watch which businesses are chasing a proven three-city formula and which ones are just waiting for their old block to get rebuilt.
Enjoy the Overlap While It Lasts
None of this is a reason to wait on trying anything. Palermo Pizza Club's 48-hour fermented dough and Mini Kabob's family recipes are worth a trip to Neighborly regardless of how the ownership math shakes out. The same goes for whatever produce stand at the Sunday market is still staffed by a Palisades vendor before that Wednesday migration finishes playing out.
But it's worth knowing, walking through the Village this month, that you're looking at two different stories that happen to be sharing a zip code right now. One of them, built around national brands and a landlord with a proven playbook, is likely to still be there next September. The other is a group of neighbors figuring out in real time whether Brentwood is a stop or a destination.
If you're curious about how neighborhoods like Brentwood hold up over time, that's the kind of question Carmody Real Estate spends a lot of time thinking through with clients. Contact us anytime you want a local, honest read on what's actually changing here and what's just passing through.
