Walk down Catalina Avenue past Avenue I this month and the storefront at 1810 doesn't look like it used to. The sign that spent eight years reading Gabi James, the Spanish-French kitchen that closed its doors in late April, now says Martha's. If you know Martha's from its original Hermosa Beach location, a 22nd Street breakfast counter that has run since 1984, you might assume the Redondo version is more of the same: eggs, coffee, a patio full of regulars before noon. It isn't. For the first time in the brand's four decades, Martha's is serving dinner, and the reason it decided to try that here, in this specific building, on this specific block, has less to do with the menu and more to do with a city council vote most residents scrolled past in May.
What Actually Changed at 1810 Catalina
The new Martha's Redondo Beach occupies a 5,000 square foot building split across two floors, tucked between Fringe and Redondo Beach Brew. The upstairs space, which the ownership group had been hunting for specifically, gives Martha's room to run private dining and events for groups of 80 to 100, something the original Hermosa location was never built to handle. Downstairs keeps the familiar rhythm: coffee in the morning, the breakfast burrito, the champagne brunch crowd that made the 22nd Street original a fixture.
What's new is the evening. From 5 to 9 p.m., Martha's Redondo Beach runs a dinner service led by chef Johnny DeVivo, who came over from Rolling Hills Country Club. The menu leans into American comfort food: burgers, chicken, ribs, steak, pasta, short ribs. It is a different register than the Village's usual dinner options, and it is the first time this particular business has bet that a daytime brand can also work after dark.
The Vote That Made the Bet Easier
Here's the part that doesn't show up on the menu. Co-owner Hilary Condren pointed to a specific piece of city policy as part of what made Riviera Village feel ready for this kind of investment: the Redondo Beach City Council's decision this spring to extend the Village's outdoor dining deck program for another five years.
Those decks, the parklette-style seating that spilled onto Catalina Avenue during the pandemic, were never guaranteed to stick around. Plenty of beach cities treated them as an emergency measure to be dismantled once indoor dining came back. Manhattan Beach, by contrast, spent years running its own outdoor dining question through a formal task force, community workshops, and draft code language that stretched from a 2021 council directive into 2025. Redondo Beach skipped that extended process for the Village and simply locked its version in for five more years.
For a restaurant deciding whether to sink money into a two-floor buildout with a dedicated event space, that difference matters. A year-to-year permit is a reason to stay small. A five-year commitment from the city is a reason to build something bigger than you'd otherwise risk. Condren said as much directly, calling the extension part of what keeps the Riviera "an energetic community," and his team is already thinking in those longer terms, with plans to open three more locations along the California coast, from Santa Barbara down to San Diego, over the next three years.
Not the First Domino
Martha's isn't the only business that has read the Village this way recently. Two summers ago, a former liquor store on Catalina Avenue was gutted and rebuilt as BeachLife Grotto, a two-story restaurant from BeachLife Festival co-founder Allen Sanford and partners, designed by architect Miles Pritzkat, whose own office sits a few doors down in the Village. The building kept its original walls but lost its slanted roof in favor of an open-beam upper deck, built explicitly to echo two bygone South Bay favorites, the old Admiral Risty in Palos Verdes and Millie Riera's Seafood Grotto. It was, in its own way, the same logic Martha's is now following: take an underused ground floor property and turn it into something with a real upstairs, built for an evening crowd rather than a lunch rush.
Two data points two years apart isn't proof of a citywide trend, but it is a pattern worth naming for anyone who eats in the Village regularly. The buildings getting reinvested in are the ones with room to grow up, not just out, and the businesses willing to make that bet are increasingly counting on five years of predictable outdoor seating rather than a permit renewed one summer at a time.
What This Means If You're Deciding Where to Eat This Month
If your Village routine has been lunch, happy hour, and an early dinner before heading elsewhere for a real night out, that routine is worth revisiting. A few concrete things changed on the ground in the past few months:
- Martha's now runs dinner service nightly from 5 to 9 p.m. at 1810 S. Catalina Ave, a menu built around steak, ribs, short ribs, and pasta rather than its usual breakfast lineup.
- The outdoor dining decks along Catalina Avenue, which have felt semi-permanent since 2020, now have a confirmed five-year runway from the city, which is longer than what most neighboring beach cities have committed to.
- A vacancy that sat open for months after Gabi James closed in late April has been filled by a business willing to invest in a two-floor buildout rather than a smaller, single-purpose lease.
None of this makes the Village unrecognizable. The daytime identity, the boutiques, the salons, the sidewalk tables at brunch, is still exactly what it was. What's shifted is the evening math. There are now more reasons to stay in the neighborhood after 6 p.m. than there were a year ago.
September's Bigger Night Out
If you want a reason to walk the harbor side of the neighborhood this month rather than the Catalina Avenue strip, the 22nd Annual Redondo Beach Lobster Festival returns to Seaside Lagoon from September 22 through 24. A weekend pass runs $35 and covers music, local beer, cocktails, and a lineup of lobster dinner packages, from a 1.25 pound Maine lobster plate up to a 2 pound version for the more ambitious. This year's signature chef is Jessica Jordan of Fishbar in Manhattan Beach, serving smaller versions of her lobster bistro dishes alongside the festival's usual spread.
It's a different stretch of the neighborhood than Riviera Village proper, and a different kind of evening than a dinner reservation at Martha's. But taken together, a restaurant scene adding real dinner service for the first time and a 22-year-old festival still drawing crowds down at the lagoon, September is shaping up to be a month where staying local for a night out actually feels like the better option rather than the consolation one.
If you've been circling this neighborhood for a while and these are the kinds of details that make you want to know it better, from the restaurant openings to the way city decisions like the dining deck extension shape what gets built next, that local read is exactly what Janet Chen Group brings to every conversation about Redondo Beach. Reach out for a personalized consultation and a free home valuation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
