"Circle Bar isn't just a bar. It's part of Santa Monica's cultural DNA. Everyone has a Circle Bar story." Mark Van Gessel said that in May, standing in the same oval room where Jim Morrison and Truman Capote once drank, right before he and his wife Addie reopened the 1949 Main Street institution after nearly three years dark. The floor plan hadn't moved an inch. The DJ booth got a new name, The Halo, and $2 million went into sound and lighting nobody would notice unless they'd been coming here since before it closed.
A mile away and a few weeks earlier, Mayor Caroline Torosis was cutting a ribbon at a Raising Cane's on the Third Street Promenade, telling a crowd that had lined up since 8 p.m. the night before that the chicken chain's arrival marked a milestone for a downtown that's spent years trying to rebuild its commercial core.
Both openings got covered as good news for Santa Monica. Both are. But they're not the same story, and if you live here, the difference matters more than either headline suggests.
Two Theories of a Comeback
Downtown Santa Monica is being rebuilt from the outside in. The city approved a $3 million plan this spring that widened the entertainment zone so visitors can now carry a drink from a participating restaurant across the length of the Promenade, eliminated a $1,000-per-seat wastewater fee that had been discouraging new restaurant buildouts, and dropped downtown parking to $1 for the first 90 minutes. Torosis has also pointed to a 12.5% drop in serious crime as part of the case that the investment is paying off. It's a policy bet, funded and coordinated, aimed at national brands with the capital to sign leases in a downtown that, as of this summer, still has nearly three in ten Promenade storefronts sitting empty.
Main Street is being rebuilt from the inside out, by people who already had a stake in the neighborhood before they took on a new lease. The Van Gessels didn't need Circle Bar to work as an investment thesis. They already ran Hinano Cafe in Venice and Tavern on Main a few doors down. They took over a room with 75 years of history because the alternative was watching it stay dark, and every choice they made, down to keeping the 1949 floor plan untouched, was about continuity rather than novelty.
Here's the corridor-by-corridor version of what that split looks like right now:
Corridor | What's arriving | What's driving it |
|---|---|---|
Downtown / Third St. Promenade | Raising Cane's, TikTok Shop, an entertainment zone that now allows open containers | City-funded revitalization plan, national chains |
Main Street | Circle Bar (reopened), PonTu, La Diperie | Local operators reinvesting in legacy spaces |
Montana Avenue | The Win~Dow | A single fast-casual concept breaking a no-fast-food norm |
Ocean Park | SweatHouz, Bower Santa Monica (Colorado Center) | Wellness and hospitality-as-amenity, not straight dining |
Wilshire / Main St. fine dining | Seline's 2026 James Beard win | Chef reputation, not real estate turnover |
Downtown's Bet on Volume
The Cane's opening wasn't an isolated event. It landed the same week as a FIFA store opening downtown and arrived alongside a broader push tied to World Cup 2026 programming that the city has been building toward. Torosis called the timing part of "a broader burst of civic activity downtown." The restaurant's interior, designed to reflect the local community the way Cane's does at every location, includes disco ball surfboards made by a local artisan, a small gesture toward place-making inside a format that is, by design, replicable in any city.
That's the tension sitting under the whole downtown strategy. The policy tools, cheaper parking, a wider drinking zone, no wastewater fee, are aimed at making the Promenade attractive to exactly the kind of tenant that can absorb a national rollout risk. It's working in the sense that storefronts are filling. It hasn't yet closed the vacancy gap. Nearly a third of the retail base down there is still dark, even after Britannia Pub's three-decade run on Santa Monica Boulevard ended this summer, its lease set to be replaced by a Taco Bell Cantina, and after Misfit Bar and Restaurant closed in April following 15 years in business. The corridor is trading some of its independent, long-tenured operators for chain volume at almost the same rate it's filling empty space.
Main Street's Bet on Memory
Main Street is solving the same vacancy problem with the opposite instinct. When Holey Grail Donuts closed at 2441 Main Street, the space didn't sit empty waiting for a franchise decision from a corporate real estate team. La Diperie, a Montreal-founded dipped ice cream and donut chain with more than 65 locations across Canada and Florida, is moving in as its first West Coast outpost, but it's a small, single-location bet in a specific spot, not a citywide rollout.
Further south on Ocean Park Boulevard, the same pattern held when the longstanding OP Cafe closed. Richie Lopez opened PonTu in that address, a Peruvian concept built around seasonal ceviches and tiraditos with California coastal touches. The address carried weight for people who'd been going to OP Cafe for years, and the new operator seems to know it.
Circle Bar remains the clearest example. The Van Gessels could have gutted the room and built something contemporary. Instead they kept the oval bar, the historic signage, the dark exterior, and spent their money on the parts nobody sees until the lights go down: a fully upgraded QSC speaker system, a Chauvet lighting rig, a new elevated DJ booth built specifically so the DJ is no longer tucked to the side of the room. Addie Van Gessel put it plainly when the reopening was announced: the goal was a room that "feels authentic," where longtime patrons recognize what's still there.
The Corridors That Broke Their Own Rules
Montana Avenue has spent decades as the strip that doesn't do fast food. That's what made the June opening of The WinDow at 930 Montana Avenue, in the space that used to be Go Get Em Tiger, genuinely surprising. The concept was originally slated to open there in mid-March, but the timeline slipped, and it ended up debuting the same week as the Cane's ribbon-cutting downtown, a coincidence that puts two very different fast-food bets on the calendar at the same time. Founders Paul Hibler and Jeff Goodman built The WinDow around a single, deliberately affordable smashburger, and Montana Avenue's willingness to let it in says something about how far the corridor's own rules have started to bend.
Ocean Park took a different kind of detour. Instead of restaurants, the neighborhood picked up SweatHouz, a contrast-therapy studio offering private infrared sauna and cold plunge suites, with a second downtown location already planned. At Colorado Center, the 15-acre office campus that anchors the neighborhood's east end, BXP and restaurateur Dave Harper are building Bower Santa Monica, a roughly 6,500-square-foot surf-inspired food and wellness hub named for a break at Manly Beach in Australia. Neither of these is a restaurant replacing a restaurant. They're new categories entirely, wellness treated as a daily-life amenity rather than an occasional splurge.
What This Adds Up to on a Given Weekend
If you already live here, none of this changes what block you'd walk to for a specific mood, but it does explain why those blocks feel different from each other lately. Downtown still has the farmers market at Third and Arizona on Wednesdays and Saturdays, still has Block Fest programming pulling people back to the Promenade on weekends, but it also has more chain storefronts and more open patio drinking than it did two years ago. Main Street still has the same operators you'd recognize, just doing more with the spaces they've held onto or taken back.
For a serious dinner, the fine-dining cluster around Wilshire and Main hasn't needed a comeback story at all. Josiah Citrin's two-Michelin-starred Melisse anchors that stretch, and chef Dave Beran's Seline, which opened on Main Street in December 2024, won the 2026 James Beard Award for Best Chef: California in June, putting his one-star bistro Pasjoli back in the conversation too. That corner of the city was never vacant to begin with.
The two comebacks aren't in competition with each other. They're just different answers to the same question about what a Santa Monica block should feel like right now, and for anyone who's spent the last few years watching storefronts turn over, that's the part worth understanding before you decide where to go tonight.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a property on one of these blocks, whether you're planning a sale nearby or just curious what a design-forward listing looks like in this market, The Kohl Team knows this stretch of the Westside block by block. Request Your Complimentary Home Valuation to start the conversation.