Walk past the Neptune fountain on any weekday afternoon and you'll see the usual rhythm: someone balancing a rotisserie chicken box from the Ranch Market, a stroller parked outside Yellow Vase, a dog waiting patiently by the arcade columns. Malaga Cove Plaza has run on this rhythm since the 1920s, and most of its storefronts haven't changed hands in a generation. So when a new sign went up at 55 Malaga Cove Plaza last fall, in the space that used to be a RE/MAX office, it was worth asking why now, and why this.
The answer says something about how this particular stretch of Palos Verdes Estates actually fills a vacancy, and it's not the story you'd expect from a shopping center this close to the ocean.
A Category That Went Missing
In 2018, Yummy Yogurt closed its doors in Rolling Hills Estates after more than three decades in business. It wasn't just a shop closing. It was the Peninsula's go-to frozen treat spot disappearing, and for years afterward, nothing stepped in to replace it. No national froyo chain expanded onto the hill, and no new frozen treat shop opened in Malaga Cove or Lunada Bay to take its place. If you wanted soft serve after a Little League game or a hot Saturday at the beach, you drove down the hill.
That gap sat open for seven years. Then, within months of each other in late 2025, it closed twice.
Two Shops, Same Season, No Coincidence
Neptune's Frozen Treats opened at 55 Malaga Cove Plaza in fall 2025, run by a mother-daughter team, Gemma and Katherine Kemps. Katherine grew up in Palos Verdes and graduated from Southern Methodist University the year before opening the shop. Frozen dessert is, by her own account, in the family's blood. Her great-great-grandfather, William Henry Kemps, ran Beverly Dairy in Los Angeles and Kemps Ice Cream in the Midwest, a lineage that still carries the family name in the ice cream business today.
The shop occupies roughly 900 square feet just north of Yellow Vase, with five self-serve machines rotating flavors like cookies n' cream, espresso, oat milk vanilla, and vegan mango sorbet, plus a topping bar running from fresh blackberries to chocolate wafer straws. The name and the wave-detailed logo are a direct wink at the plaza's Neptune statue, and the shop's mosaic tile wall, built by Jonathan Cohen of Joseph & Sons, makes that reference literal on the interior wall.
Katherine describes the shop's signature move as much about ritual as flavor:
"We're really big on the third handle, it's really important. On one side is one flavor, on the other side is another flavor and the middle handle, that's the twist!"
Getting there wasn't instant. Gemma Kemps filed the conditional use permit application on behalf of Neptune's, and the Palos Verdes Estates Planning Commission approved it on December 4, 2024, roughly ten months before the doors opened. Any eating establishment in the plaza's commercial zone needs that approval, a reminder that even a straightforward frozen yogurt counter has to clear the same municipal process as a full restaurant.
Meanwhile, at Lunada Bay Plaza, Julie and Jason Anthony opened Lunada Creamery around the same window. The Anthonys had lived in Palos Verdes Estates for nine years and wanted a frozen treat shop within walking distance of their house, something closer to the old Big Chill or the Redondo Beach spot now known as Wanna Chill? than to a franchise concept.
Neither shop is a chain reentry. Neither is backed by outside investors chasing a proven concept. Both are personal bets by people who already lived here, made at almost exactly the same time, seven years after the category disappeared. That pattern is worth noticing if you live on the Peninsula: when an obvious commercial gap exists, it tends to get filled by someone with roots in the community long before it attracts outside capital.
The Plaza That Doesn't Change Much
Neptune's new corner is the exception, not the rule, at Malaga Cove Plaza. Most of what surrounds it has stayed put for decades.
Malaga Cove Ranch Market, at 43 Malaga Cove Plaza, has been family owned and operated for more than 25 years. The kitchen turns out homemade banana bread, enchiladas, rotisserie chicken, pita chips, baklava, and lasagna daily, alongside a deli counter and a wine and beer bar. It functions as much as a neighborhood living room as a market.
The fountain that gives Neptune's its name predates almost everything else in the plaza. Dedicated in 1930, it's a replica of a fountain in Bologna, Italy, depicting the Roman god of the sea, and it sits at the plaza's literal center. Elsewhere in the plaza, its oldest building, completed in 1925 and known as the Gardner Building or La Casa Primera, once housed the first Palos Verdes Post Office. Its ground floor originally leased space to real estate offices, and its second floor housed the Palos Verdes Project, the Art Jury, and the Homes Association, the organizations that shaped the plaza's original design rules. Real estate and Malaga Cove Plaza have been tied together since the buildings themselves went up.
What's on the Lawn This Month
If you're planning a weekend around the plaza, the Palos Verdes Art Center's Art on the Lawn shows are worth building it around. It's a tradition the Palos Verdes Art Center says goes back more than 82 years, and the 2026 schedule runs Saturday and Sunday for six weekends: May 9 and 10, June 20 and 21, July 11 and 12, August 15 and 16, September 12 and 13, and October 10 and 11.
That means the next show lands this coming weekend. Artists from seven Peninsula groups typically show, including:
- Artists Open Group
- Pacific Arts Group
- Peninsula Artists
- Photographic and Digital Artists
- Third Dimension
- The Artists of Palos Verdes Studio
Expect paintings, photography, ceramics, and custom jewelry spread across the plaza's central lawn, with the fountain and the arcade as the backdrop they've had for nearly a century.
The Takeaway for Anyone Who Lives Here
Malaga Cove Plaza doesn't turn over often, and when it does, it tends to go to someone who already has a reason to be there rather than a brand looking for a foothold. That's worth remembering the next time a storefront sits empty for a while. The plaza isn't slow because nobody wants in. It's slow because the people who eventually fill those spaces are usually waiting for their own moment, not chasing someone else's trend.
If you're weighing what that kind of neighborhood consistency means for a home purchase or sale in Palos Verdes Estates, Dreams Worth Living works this stretch of the Peninsula block by block, plaza by plaza. Discover your South Bay home when you're ready to talk specifics.
