Walk into Palisades Village on a Friday night right now and the place looks finished. Tables are full at Spacca Tutto. There's a line for McConnell's. Someone is carrying a Loomey's Toys bag, even though the store hasn't technically opened for the season yet. From the sidewalk, the story looks simple: the Village came back on August 15, and the neighborhood came back with it.
That story is true for dinner. It is not true for a Tuesday afternoon when you need milk, dish soap, and something for lunch tomorrow. Nearly six weeks after the reopening, and one day after the newest storefront cut its ribbon, Pacific Palisades has its evenings and weekends back. It does not yet have its errand run back, and the gap between those two things is wider, and will last longer, than the reopening coverage let on.
What you can actually do there this week
If your plans involve dinner, dessert, a boutique purchase, or a Wednesday walk through a farmers market, the Village is functioning at close to full capacity. Since August 15, the businesses running normal hours include:
- Spacca Tutto, the Italian American steakhouse from Nancy Silverton, Caruso, and River Jetty Restaurant Group, open for all-day dining in the space that used to hold The Draycott.
- Alphabet Bar & Grill, chef Timothy Hollingsworth's new concept for the h.wood Group, serving lunch and dinner daily.
- Angelini Ristorante & Bar, chef Gino Angelini's return, which he chose to reopen quietly rather than with fanfare.
- Porta Via, back in its original Palisades spot, even as its Beverly Hills location stays shut after an unrelated spring kitchen fire.
- K Bakery, where longtime Palisades resident Kim Kedeshian is fifteen years in and now baking English muffins, croissants, and cake orders out of the former Jemma Pizzeria space, Tuesday through Sunday.
- McConnell's Ice Cream, open daily until 10 p.m., with lines out the door the weekend it reopened.
- elysewalker, relocated to a new 5,000-square-foot flagship at the Sunset and Swarthmore corner, with the Towne concept store reopening alongside it.
That is a full night out, start to finish, inside one walkable block. It is also, notably, not a grocery list.
The wave that landed this week
The newest addition arrived yesterday. Amy Russo's Palisades General Store held its grand opening on September 19, reviving the Obsessed jewelry business she lost when the January 2025 fire destroyed her original shop. It is a small, family-run storefront built back from nothing, and it lands alongside a cluster of other September openings: Buck Mason, Jacques Marie Mage, and City National Bank have all put up signage for openings this month.
None of those are errand-run businesses either. They are the second wave of the same category as the August reopening, retail and lifestyle brands filling in a shopping and dining district. That is worth sitting with for a second, because the pattern holds across every name added to the roster since mid-August. The neighborhood is filling back in one boutique, one restaurant, one bar at a time, and every single one of them assumes you already have your groceries handled somewhere else.
What's still dark, and for how long
Here is the part that doesn't show up in a ribbon-cutting photo. Erewhon, the specialty grocer that's part of the pre-fire tenant list, has signage up along Sunset Boulevard indicating it won't return until January 2027. Loomey's Toys, despite showing up in some of the early coverage as an opening-day tenant, isn't expected to open its doors until November. Staud is targeting January 2027. Mother is targeting February 2027.
Zoom out one block and the picture gets starker. The Ralphs at 15120 W. Sunset Blvd., the supermarket most Palisades households built their week around, burned in the fire and has no public construction timeline. Whether Gelson's returns to its old spot at 15424 Sunset is still an open question. And the Business Block, the Spanish Colonial mixed-use building that once held Cosa Nostra Trattoria and a Starbucks, is still a cleared shell behind construction barricades. Its return, by every account, will be measured in years, not months.
Erewhon inside the Village, whenever it lands, will help. It is a very good specialty grocer. It is not a substitute for the weekly supermarket run that Ralphs used to handle for most of the neighborhood, and that gap is going to outlast the headlines about the reopening by a wide margin.
Two farmers markets, two different days
One thing that trips people up right now: the Palisades has two farmers markets running at the same time, on overlapping streets, on different days.
| Market | Day and hours | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Palisades Farmers Market | Sundays | Swarthmore and Antioch, longtime neighborhood fixture that kept running through the rebuild |
| Palisades Village Farmers Market | Wednesdays, 1:30 to 5:30 p.m. | Swarthmore Avenue stretch inside the Village, running through December 30 |
The Sunday market is the one that never stopped, the one locals have leaned on since before the fire. The Wednesday market is new, tied specifically to the Village's reopening, with vendors selling fruit, vegetables, eggs, and flowers along the same street where the boutiques now sit. If you've been showing up on the wrong day expecting the wrong vendors, you're not alone. They are both real, they are both worth a visit, and they are not the same market wearing a different hat.
What this actually means for your next few months
The honest read on the Palisades right now is a neighborhood with its social life back before its supply chain. You can get a steak from Nancy Silverton, a scoop from McConnell's, and a gift from Amy Russo's new store all in the same afternoon. What you can't yet do is treat the Village as a replacement for the supermarket run you used to make without thinking about it.
That's not a criticism of how the rebuild has gone. Retail and dining leases move faster than grocery infrastructure, and the businesses that reopened first are, almost without exception, the ones that don't require a loading dock, a walk-in freezer, or a full commercial kitchen buildout from the studs. The sequence makes sense. It's just not the sequence most of the reopening coverage implied when it treated August 15 as the finish line.
If you live here, plan your fall accordingly. The dinner reservations, the ice cream run, the Wednesday market walk, all of that works now. The full grocery list is still, for the moment, a drive somewhere else.
If you're watching the Palisades from outside the neighborhood and wondering what any of this means for buying, selling, or timing a move here, that's a longer conversation, and one worth having with someone who's tracking the block-by-block details as closely as the rebuild itself is unfolding. Carmody Real Estate is happy to be that conversation whenever you're ready for it.
