The most useful thing to know about Santa Monica right now is that the summer isn't concentrated on the Pier. It's spread across three walking corridors, each with its own tempo, and residents who track them individually get a much better calendar than those who default to Ocean Avenue on a Saturday. Montana has become a quiet gallery of national debuts. Main and Ocean Park are collecting the chef-driven rooms. Downtown and the Pier are staging the big set pieces tied to the World Cup and everything that follows it. Here's what has actually landed, and what to plan around before Labor Day.
Montana Avenue is quietly getting national firsts
Montana has always been the neighborhood's polished retail spine, and this spring it picked up two of the more interesting food arrivals on the Westside. The Win~Dow opened its seventh Los Angeles-area location at 930 Montana Ave. in the space that used to hold Go Get Em Tiger, a 50-seat room designed by the Klein Agency with murals by KC Haxton. The concept began in 2019 as a walk-up attached to American Beauty on Rose Avenue, and the menu still centers on a $4.50 smashburger with pickles, American cheese, and a pink house sauce on a potato bun. The Santa Monica opening drew a line around the block on day one, which is worth mentioning because Father's Office sits a few steps away on the same block, giving Montana two of the city's best-known burger rooms within a minute's walk of each other.
A block and a half east, Italian gelato brand Bacio di Latte is opening its second Santa Monica location at 1510 Montana Ave., next to the Italian market Sogno Toscano. And downtown-adjacent shoppers should note that Raising Cane's cut the ribbon on the Third Street Promenade in June 2026, an opening the city framed as a signal of downtown recovery rather than a chicken story, with Mayor Caroline Torosis on hand and roughly 100 new local jobs attached to the location.
Main Street and Ocean Park are collecting the chef-driven rooms
If Montana is the corridor for expansions and second locations, Main Street and Ocean Park are where the ambitious kitchens keep landing.
The headline is Seline. Dave Beran's tasting-menu room on Main Street opened in December 2024, joined the Michelin Guide within months, and in June 2026 won Beran the James Beard Award for Best Chef: California. The seasonal menu runs fourteen to eighteen courses at $295, and tables have gotten materially harder to book since the Beard win. Three to four weeks out is the current reality. His French bistro Pasjoli sits at 2732 Main Street, holds a Michelin star, and is the easier a la carte way into the same kitchen group. If you have been meaning to try either, this is the summer to actually make the reservation.
Down the street at 3117 Ocean Park Blvd., a Peruvian restaurant called PonTu is preparing to open in the former OP Cafe space. Chef Richie Lopez has described the concept as seasonal Peruvian cooking with California coastal elements, weighted toward ceviches and tiraditos. The opening timeline is permit-dependent, which is worth flagging because Ocean Park permit review has been the friction point on more than one recent local opening.
A few other Ocean Park and Main Street notes for the running list:
- La Diperie is taking over 2441 Main St., the former Holey Grail Donuts. The Montreal chain specializes in dipped ice cream, cakes, donuts, and cookies with more than 20 toppings, and the Santa Monica outpost will be its first West Coast location.
- Bower Santa Monica, a 6,500-square-foot all-day restaurant and community hub from restaurateur Dave Harper and New School Hospitality, is set to open at the Colorado Center campus this summer. Its name comes from Fairy Bower in Manly Beach, Australia.
- Holy Basil Santa Monica at 2828 Santa Monica Blvd. brought the DTLA Thai wok team west, with communal seating and an open kitchen running very hot.
- Jade Rabbit, a fast-casual Chinese American concept from Bryant Ng and Kim Luu-Ng of the now-closed Cassia, opened as a build-your-own combo shop with entries starting at $13.
Downtown and the Pier are staging the set pieces
The Pier corridor is where the city is spending its coordinated energy this summer, and the calendar is unusually dense.
FIFA World Cup 2026 anchors the season. The Michelob ULTRA Pitchside Club opened on the Pier in June, timed to the kickoff of the tournament, and the city has been layering official watch parties and activations from the first U.S. match through the final whistle. On July 19, the entire downtown grid goes car-free, stretching from the Promenade and Metro stations across Ocean Park Boulevard, Colorado, Arizona, and the Pier for a single festival day. This is the summer's largest single-day footprint and worth planning around whether you're attending or avoiding.
Two more items deserve calendar space:
The Santa Monica City Council approved partnering with Goldenvoice, the Coachella producer, on a new annual beachfront music festival launching in fall 2026, with an estimated capacity of 30,000 to 35,000 and 12 to 15 artists across a single day. The Pier-adjacent festival is scheduled to return in 2027 and 2028 as the run-up to the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
That's a significant new baseline for the neighborhood. A single Goldenvoice date at the beach, repeated annually, changes the character of a shoulder-season weekend in a way residents will feel in traffic patterns, hotel occupancy, and short-term rental pricing long before it changes anything in the restaurants.
Free programming continues alongside the ticketed pieces. Pier 360 Beach Festival ran June 27 and 28 with paddleboard races, beach volleyball, the Santa Monica Strongman Classic, Ghost Jam Skate, and the POP SK8 roller rink on the Pier deck. Third Thursdays return September through May with DJs, a classic car show, and kids' activities on the Pier. Wellness & Waves keeps its group run at 8 to 9 a.m. followed by yoga or pilates overlooking the ocean. And the city's State of the City event lands July 23 at Ocean Park Branch Library and Main Street, with live entertainment and community programming.
If you are cataloguing the season on one page, the shape looks like this:
- May 1 — Inaugural Santa Monica International Jazz Festival with Kamasi Washington
- June — Michelob ULTRA Pitchside Club opens on the Pier for the World Cup
- June 27–28 — Pier 360 Beach Festival
- July 4 — Fourth of July Parade returns to Main Street, marking America's 250th and Route 66's 100th
- July 19 — Car-free festival across downtown, Ocean Park, and the Pier
- July 23 — State of the City at Ocean Park
- Fall 2026 — Inaugural Goldenvoice beach festival
The hotel and wellness layer has moved too
A few adjacent updates that shape where residents send visiting friends. Hyatt Centric Delfina Santa Monica completed a $16 million renovation, redoing all 315 guestrooms and introducing more than 15,000 square feet of meeting space, including the 4,526-square-foot Delfina Ballroom, which the property describes as Santa Monica's only rooftop ballroom overlooking the Pacific. Coastal Harvest Bar & Kitchen was reworked in the same project. Hotel Casa Del Mar is marking its 100th year on Ocean Avenue. On the wellness side, SweatHouz opened a contrast-therapy suite concept in Ocean Park with a second Downtown location on the way, each private suite pairing an infrared sauna, a Vitamin-C shower, and a cold plunge.
A local's rhythm for the rest of the season
Read across the three corridors and a workable summer plan emerges without much effort.
Weekday lunches belong to Montana and Ocean Park, where The Win~Dow, Jade Rabbit, and the incoming Bower slot into a walkable radius that avoids the World Cup crowds funneling toward the Pier. Weeknight dinners are the moment to finally book Pasjoli or a Seline seat now that you know the Beard win has pushed the counter three to four weeks out. Weekend mornings, Wellness & Waves and the Pier deck are still the best public front-yard the city has, and they get quieter once the school year begins. Saturdays with visiting guests split cleanly: Pier and Promenade for anyone who wants the postcard, Ocean Park and Main Street for anyone who wants the meal they will remember.
The through line for residents is that the neighborhood's center of gravity is no longer a single address. Montana has quietly become a corridor for national debuts. Ocean Park is where the awarded kitchens keep landing. Downtown and the Pier are hosting the largest civic events the city has scheduled in a decade, with the Goldenvoice festival setting an annual baseline that runs straight through LA28. Knowing which corridor is peaking on which weekend is what separates a resident's summer from a visitor's.
If you are thinking about how the same shifts are reshaping property values, buyer demand, and off-market activity along these corridors, Susan Stark Homes tracks the Westside micro-markets weekly and works with a small number of clients at a time. Request a private consultation to discuss what the current season means for your address.
