Casey Lane was a newcomer from Portland when he opened The Tasting Kitchen in 2009, on a stretch of Abbot Kinney that still felt more surf shop than storefront. The dining room had an olive tree growing up through the middle of it, handwritten menus that changed most nights depending on what the markets gave him, and speakers that leaned hard into 90s and 2000s hip-hop rather than the ambient playlists that now soundtrack most of the street. Jonathan Gold wrote about it. The James Beard Foundation named it a semifinalist four years running. For a decade, it was the kind of place that made Abbot Kinney a destination rather than just a shopping street with good light.
Then, in March 2023, a fire closed it. What followed wasn't a quick patch job. It was three years of permits, construction, and, by Lane's own account, a long rethink of what the restaurant should become. On July 16, 2026, The Tasting Kitchen reopened at 1633 Abbot Kinney Boulevard, with Lane back in the kitchen. The bones of the idea are the same. The room, and the street holding it, are not.
What Actually Came Back on July 16
The new Tasting Kitchen keeps the ingredient-driven instincts that made the original a fixture, but the format has changed. Guests can now choose between a curated tasting menu and a more flexible à la carte option, something the restaurant didn't offer in its first run. Live-fire cooking has been added alongside the pastas and mackerel dishes longtime regulars will recognize. Designer Matt Winter of M Winter Design rebuilt the interior around a 32-person main dining room, a 24-seat mezzanine, and a 34-seat bar with built-in shelving, trading some of the original's lo-fi, bohemian clutter for a cleaner, more composed look. Blake Antrobus, who most recently worked the beverage program at Monsieur Dior by Dominique Crenn, is running drinks.
The rollout has been deliberately slow. Opening week ran 5 p.m. to 9 p.m., then expanded to Wednesday through Sunday on the same schedule. By this month, the plan has been to move to a full seven-day week with late nights running until 1 a.m. on weekends, the kind of hours that used to define the old Tasting Kitchen's after-dark energy. If that schedule is fully in place by the time you read this, it means the restaurant has finished re-teaching itself how to run at the pace it once did.
The address never moved. What surrounds it did.
That's really the story here, and it's worth sitting with for a second before moving to the rest of the block, because Tasting Kitchen's return is only half of what's happening on Abbot Kinney this summer. The other half is a very different model of change, and it's playing out just a few storefronts away.
The Other Way to Fill a Storefront
Not every reopening on this street is a return. Earlier this year, the restaurant group behind Menotti's, Townhouse, and Culver City's Hatchet Hall took over the old James Beach space and turned it into Si! Mon, an entirely new concept helmed by chef José Carles, who trained in Panama City and whose other restaurant, Fonda Lo Que Hay, has drawn attention from Latin America's 50 Best. James Beach had been a queer neighborhood bar and locals' watering hole for years, the kind of unpretentious, affordable spot that defined an older, scrappier Venice. Si! Mon is not trying to be that. It's positioned for a crowd comfortable spending around $150 a person on raw plates and yuca tostadas built from Panama's Chinese, Spanish, and Afro-Caribbean culinary traditions.
Put the two stories side by side and the contrast is the point. The Tasting Kitchen came back as itself, with its founding chef, its original address, and enough of its original identity that the reopening reads as continuity rather than replacement. Si! Mon erased what was there and built something unrelated in its place. Both are legitimate ways for a commercial strip to evolve. They are not the same way, and a block that's doing both at once tells you something about where the street's audience is right now: prosperous enough to support a full concept overhaul at James Beach's old address, but nostalgic enough that a chef returning to rebuild his own restaurant, brick by brick, is treated as the bigger local story.
Smaller Signs of the Same Split
The pattern repeats at a much smaller scale a few blocks over. Meadow, a walk-up window near the boardwalk right under the Venice sign, just started serving Greek frozen yogurt in two flavors, including a tart yogurt base finished with pistachio crunch, flaky sea salt, and a dark chocolate drizzle. It's new, additive, and doesn't erase anything that came before it.
A few doors down, the team behind the Venice wine shop Vin on Rose took over the space next door, the former home of Moon Juice, and opened it as a cheese and sandwich shop stocked with charcuterie, tinned fish, and a small rotating sandwich menu that includes a jamon beurre, a caprese, and a duck rillette banh mi. Rather than bringing in an outside concept to fill the vacancy, an existing Venice business simply grew into the space next to itself.
Two small storefronts, two different instincts:
- Addition, not replacement: Meadow fills a gap that didn't have anything in it before, adding to the street rather than swapping something out.
- Growth from within: Vin on Rose expanding into its neighbor's old footprint keeps a known Venice name attached to a familiar corner rather than handing it to someone new.
Neither is as loaded as what happened at James Beach or at 1633 Abbot Kinney. But they're the same instinct playing out at a smaller scale, which is a useful reminder that this isn't one story about one restaurant. It's a pattern showing up at every size of storefront on the street right now.
The Calendar Is Running the Same Two Tracks
The split between legacy and import shows up in the neighborhood's programming too, not just its storefronts. Just last weekend, on Aug. 9, more than 150 local artists and makers set up for the monthly Venice Street Fair, the kind of recurring, homegrown event that's been part of the neighborhood's rhythm for years.
This Saturday, Aug. 15, Muscle Beach hosts a fitness competition spanning more than 160,000 square feet of open-air competition floors, with three divisions and a two-person team format. Muscle Beach itself is about as legacy as Venice gets, a training ground with roots going back decades, still drawing competitors to the same sand.
Then, on Friday, Aug. 21, Venice gets something that reads more like an import: the Caribbean Street Carnival, a full day of music and food across four stages of Cuban, New Orleans, Latin jazz, and Afro Beats programming, with a lineup that includes Tito Puente Jr. It's new to the neighborhood's calendar this year, arriving the same way Si! Mon arrived on Abbot Kinney: as something built specifically for where Venice is now, rather than something that grew out of where it's been.
None of this means one model is right and the other is wrong. A street that only preserved itself would stagnate. A street that only replaced itself would lose the texture that made people want to live near it in the first place. What's notable about Venice this August is that both things are happening within walking distance of each other, on the same boulevard, in the same week.
Why This Matters If You Live Here
If you've been on Abbot Kinney in the past month, you've probably already felt this without naming it. A restaurant you thought was gone for good is serving dinner again. A bar you used to duck into on a Tuesday has become something else entirely. A wine shop you've bought from for years just got bigger. That's not chaos. That's a neighborhood deciding, storefront by storefront, which parts of itself are worth keeping intact and which parts are ready for something new.
The Tasting Kitchen is open now at 1633 Abbot Kinney Boulevard. If you're the kind of Venice resident who tracks these shifts as closely as we do, whether it's a chef bringing back a room you thought you'd lost or a new event taking over a stretch of sand you've walked a thousand times, we'd love to hear what you've noticed. Barbra Stover has spent two decades watching this stretch of coast change one storefront and one season at a time. Let's Connect.
