Gabi James closed its doors on Catalina Avenue in late April after an eight-year run, the kind of exit that barely registers unless you happened to walk past that week and wonder why the lights were off. By late May, word came that Martha's, the Hermosa Beach institution that has been serving breakfast since 1984, was taking over the space. A new sign, a new menu, a new team. The storefront changed hands the way storefronts in Riviera Village always do, eventually.
What didn't change is the sidewalk in front of it. The parklet that Gabi James operated out of for eight years, the wooden platform that turned a parking spot into outdoor seating, isn't going anywhere. The Redondo Beach City Council locked in another five years of the program this spring, which means the physical footprint of dining on Catalina Avenue is now guaranteed to outlast the restaurant that just left it, and quite possibly the one moving in.
What Moved Into 1810 S. Catalina Avenue
Martha's opened this summer at 1810 S. Catalina Ave, nestled between Fringe and Redondo Beach Brew, a 5,000-square-foot building split across two floors. Co-owner Hilary Condren, who took over the Martha's brand about a decade ago, tapped Johnny De Vivo, formerly the executive chef at Rolling Hills Country Club, to run the kitchen. The menu leans classic American grille, smashburgers, chicken dishes, baby back ribs, steak, short ribs, with a few dishes borrowed from the team's other property, the Hermosa Beach Italian spot The Bottle Inn.
Condren was drawn to the Village partly because of what's underneath it. He pointed to the city's choice to keep the outdoor dining decks in place as part of what makes Riviera Village feel different from other stretches of the South Bay right now. "Their downtown, their heartbeat is on fire," he said of the decision to expand there. The upstairs floor of the new space was a deciding factor too, giving the team room for private events they'd been trying to fit into the Martha's format for years. Condren says the brand is now eyeing three more locations over the next three years, somewhere between Santa Barbara and San Diego.
The Sidewalk That Outlasts the Restaurants
To understand why the parklet renewal matters more than the restaurant swap, it helps to know how the decks got there in the first place.
- Summer 2020. The Riviera Village Association built temporary outdoor dining platforms, called parklettes at the time, in what had been parking spots along Catalina Avenue. The Association fronted roughly $35,000 to construct the barriers, with the city waiving parking meter fees at those spots. The plan was to help restaurants survive a single summer, set to end after Labor Day.
- 2021. The parklets had proven popular enough that the mayor, city council, and the Association began working to make the arrangement permanent, pending approval from the California Coastal Commission, which requires cities to preserve a set number of beach-adjacent parking spaces. Councilmember Nils Nehrenheim, whose district includes the Village, called it a genuine revitalization of the street. RVA president Jeff Ginsburg described the change as a completely different experience than the pre-pandemic version of the Village.
- Spring 2026. The city council voted to extend the outdoor dining deck program in Riviera Village for another five years, even as other beach cities largely removed their own pandemic-era dining spaces.
That last point is the one worth sitting with. Redondo Beach didn't just keep something in place out of inertia. It renewed it deliberately, at a moment when the temporary infrastructure built during a public health emergency has become, functionally, more stable than any individual lease on the block. Gabi James ran its full eight-year course on that same deck. Martha's moved in with the deck itself now committed through roughly 2031, a runway that already outpaces the tenant it replaced.
The Argument Underneath the Sidewalk
None of this means the city has stopped debating the physical shape of the street. During a strategic planning session held at the Redondo Beach Library on March 31, council members raised the question of an underground parking garage for the Village, along with whether future dining decks should shift onto widened sidewalks rather than sitting in the street itself. That conversation is still open. The five-year renewal settles how long outdoor dining continues. It doesn't settle where it physically sits or what replaces the current wooden platforms if the city ever builds structured parking underneath.
So the honest version of the story isn't that Riviera Village has frozen in place. Gabi James lasted eight years in that storefront before Martha's replaced it, proof that individual leases still turn over on their own timeline. What's shifted is the infrastructure question underneath them, from will this exist to what form should it eventually take, a slower and steadier kind of change that's easy to miss if you're only tracking which restaurant occupies which address.
What's Actually on the Block Right Now
Walk Catalina Avenue today and the current lineup includes Salt & Pearl, Turquoise, Il Posto, Riviera House, The Hook & Plow, The Craftsman, Vida Modern Mexican + Tequila, Rebel Republic Social House, The Rockefeller, and BeachLife Grotto, alongside longer-running spots like H.T. Grill.
BeachLife Grotto is worth a second look for how it got there. It's the work of BeachLife Festival co-founder Allen Sanford and a group of partners that includes former Redondo Beach Police Chief Keith Kauffman, Pennywise frontman Jim Lindberg, and Skechers' Michael Greenburg. The building itself used to be a liquor store. Architect Miles Pritzkat, who keeps his office in the Village, gutted the slanted roof and reused the original walls to build a two-story white wood structure with an open-beam upper deck. Sanford has said he built it as an homage to two restaurants that shaped his own childhood in the area, the Admiral Risty over in Palos Verdes and Millie Riera's Seafood Grotto, which used to sit at Avenue I and the Esplanade. It's a small reminder that even the newest addition to the block is borrowing its shape from places that no longer exist.
This Coming Weekend on the Block
If you want to see the turnover and the permanence side by side, the Village's annual Sidewalk Sale runs this coming weekend, August 22 and 23, spilling storefronts and merchandise onto the same sidewalks the council just voted to keep hosting outdoor dining for five more years. Riviera Village counts more than 300 shops, restaurants, and services along that stretch, a density that makes the sidewalk sale one of the few times you can see the whole block's current roster in a single afternoon walk.
The next time a familiar storefront changes hands, and on a strip like this one it will, the parklet out front is the one part of the scene that isn't up for negotiation anytime soon. That's the actual shift worth noticing this year. Not which restaurant is in, but how much longer the sidewalk underneath it is built to last.
If you're weighing what a home near this stretch of the South Bay actually means for daily life, from the walk to Catalina Avenue to the rest of Redondo Beach's rhythms, Dreams Worth Living is a good place to start that conversation.
