Something has shifted on South Catalina Avenue this summer, and it is easy to miss if you only notice the new awning at 1810. The Gabi James sign came down in late April. A Martha's sign is going up in its place. That single storefront change tracks a much larger decision the Redondo Beach City Council made a few weeks later, one that will shape how the Village eats, drinks, and lingers for the next five years.
If you live within walking distance of Riviera Village, the practical version of the story is this: the parklets are staying, the operator mix is turning over faster than usual, and the block between Avenue I and Vista del Mar is now the densest concentration of new or renewed dining rooms in South Redondo.
The block that changed hands
The most concrete change is at 1810 South Catalina Avenue. The space was last home to Spanish-French restaurant Gabi James, which closed its doors in late April after an eight-year run. The incoming tenant is not a first-time operator testing the water. Longstanding Hermosa Beach restaurant Martha's is expanding this summer, and it will open at 1810 S. Catalina Ave. in the Riviera Village in Redondo Beach.
A few things about that move are worth pausing on. Condren and his team became the owners of Martha's, which opened in Hermosa Beach in 1984, about a decade ago. This is a forty-year-old Hermosa institution opening a second location one town south, not a concept debuting in a market it does not know.
The new footprint is larger than the one it replaces. Nestled between Fringe and Redondo Beach Brew, Martha's Redondo Beach will take over a 5,000-square-foot building, with square footage split across two floors, and the upstairs space was another major selling point for the Martha's team, who have long been seeking a way to incorporate private events into regular offerings for the business. A private-event floor above a full-service restaurant is a different animal than a single-level bistro, and it changes what that stretch of Catalina can host on a Friday night.
The kitchen is not being staffed casually either. The Martha's team recently announced that they have tapped Johnny De Vivo, who formerly worked as the executive chef at Rolling Hills Country Club, as the executive chef for the brand, and the restaurant will be open for breakfast, lunch and dinner, offering a classic American grille menu featuring approachable dishes such as smashburgers, chicken dishes, baby back ribs, steak, pastas and short ribs. Expect some dishes from the team's Hermosa Beach Italian restaurant The Bottle Inn sprinkled into the menu, as well.
Why the sidewalks matter more than the storefronts
The turnover story is interesting on its own, but it is not the reason to care about this summer specifically. The reason is a policy vote that most residents did not track in real time.
While other beach cities have largely removed the temporary outdoor dining spaces put in place during the pandemic to allow businesses to operate, the Redondo Beach City Council decided this month to extend the outdoor dining deck program in the Riviera Village for the next five years.
Read that against what has happened up the coast, where curbside decks have been dismantled and returned to metered parking, and the divergence is sharp. Redondo is now the beach city on this stretch of coast where an operator can plan a five-year lease with the assumption that a parklet still exists at the end of it. That changes underwriting. It changes how a chef staffs the evening. It is also, by Condren's own account, why Martha's picked the block:
Redondo has a vibrant village. Their downtown, their heartbeat is on fire.
He was direct about the mechanism. Part of it is because they've made a decision to maintain the outdoor dining that they provided to all the restaurants during COVID.
The practical translation for residents: the sidewalk seating you have been using since 2020 is not a temporary fixture that could be pulled next spring. Operators are treating it as permanent enough to build a menu, a payroll, and a private-events program around.
The BeachLife Grotto precedent
Martha's is the loudest recent arrival, but it is not the first bet on this specific idea. Two summers back, another operator with roots in the Village made the same wager on a much rougher piece of real estate.
A former Riviera Village liquor store was transformed into BeachLife Grotto restaurant, opened July 24, the latest project from BeachLife Festival co-founder Allen Sanford and partners, who took a dilapidated liquor store and adaptively reused the building. The design brief was explicit and local. Architect Miles Pritzkat, whose office is also in Riviera Village, designed the two-story white wood building with open beams on the top-floor deck; the liquor store's walls were kept and its slanted roof torn out, and Sanford worked with Pritzkat to emulate two bygone favorites, the Admiral Risty in Palos Verdes and Millie Riera's Seafood Grotto, which Sanford went to as a kid with his family at Avenue I and the Esplanade.
Two things about the BeachLife Grotto project matter for how you read the Martha's arrival. First, the operator was already embedded in Redondo culture and picked the Village specifically. Second, the concept was designed around seafood and daily volume rather than a festival cadence. "We got tired of waiting for the Festival to do more food and beverage, so we decided to do it every day," Sanford said.
Both projects share the same underlying thesis: an operator with a local track record, choosing the Village because the streetscape is durable enough to plan against. The council's five-year vote is the policy expression of that thesis.
What the block looks like now
If you have not walked Catalina between Avenue I and Vista del Mar in a few weeks, the current lineup is worth a mental map. A partial one, working from the research:
- 1810 S. Catalina Ave. — Martha's, opening this summer between Fringe and Redondo Beach Brew, replacing Gabi James
- BeachLife Grotto — seafood-forward, top-floor deck, in the former liquor store footprint
- Riviera House — a seafood-forward menu, craft cocktails, beer, wine, and music in a welcoming environment, positioned as a home for the Riviera Village
- The rest of the food row — the Village district itself is a charming collection of over 300 shops, restaurants and services along Catalina, Avenue I, Avenida del Norte, and Vista del Mar
That is a dense, walkable dining footprint concentrated in four or five blocks a single block off the sand. The five-year deck extension is what keeps that geometry usable at dinner-service scale rather than compressing it back inside four walls.
What this means for how you use the Village in August
A few practical implications for a South Redondo resident reading this in early August:
- If you have been avoiding 1810 South Catalina since the Gabi James close, the Martha's opening is imminent. A soft-open window in a 5,000-square-foot two-story build is the kind of thing you want to hit before the private-events floor gets booked out for fall.
- The two-story pattern is now the tell. Both BeachLife Grotto and Martha's are trading on upstairs space, which means the block's evening capacity is growing without the storefront count changing. Reservations at the ground-floor rooms you already know will not necessarily get harder, but the upstairs rooms are where the new demand goes.
- The parklets are worth using deliberately this summer. Redondo's five-year deck extension is a policy commitment other beach cities did not make. Every dinner outside on Catalina between now and 2031 is, in a small way, a vote for keeping it that way.
What the shape of the summer says about the Village
The easy story about Riviera Village restaurants this year is a turnover story. Gabi James closes, Martha's arrives, another concept opens on a former liquor-store lot. Told that way it sounds like ordinary churn.
The more accurate story is that the churn is happening on top of a policy floor that most South Bay downtowns do not have. When a forty-year-old Hermosa restaurant chooses this specific block for its first expansion, and a festival-scale operator builds a permanent seafood room a few doors down, they are both pricing in the same thing: sidewalks that will still belong to the restaurants in 2030. That is a small policy decision doing a lot of work in the background of a summer that otherwise looks like a normal season of openings and closings.
For residents, the takeaway is quieter and more useful than a hot-take about parking. The block you have been walking to for happy hour is being rebuilt by people who plan to be there for a while. It is a good summer to take advantage of that.
The Jen Caskey Group has watched Riviera Village turn over a full cycle of tenants since we started tracking South Redondo blocks in the 1990s, and the shape of a village matters as much as the price of any one home on the streets that feed it. If you are curious what your South Redondo home is worth in a market where the ground-floor economy is being rebuilt around your front door, Jen Caskey Group can give you a real number. Get Your Home Valuation.
