Main Street Santa Monica's New Restaurants in 2026

Ask a longtime Main Street regular what's changed this year and most will tell you: not much. The dive bar is still the dive bar. The ice cream shop is still coming. Nobody's talking about a national chain moving into the old storefront on the corner. The Promenade downtown, where a fried chicken chain cut the ribbon this summer with the mayor on hand, has seen a different kind of restaurant change.

The street's appearance may seem unchanged, but this year's business openings and the city's March measures mark changes to Main Street.

The dive bar came back, and that's the part everyone notices

Circle Bar, Main Street's dive bar since long before most current residents moved in, reopened this year after a three-year closure. The owners of Hinano Cafe took it over and kept the parts regulars would notice missing: the nearly 80-year-old signage, the round bar itself. They added a bigger dance floor, a refreshed drink menu, and a daily happy hour they call Power Hours, five-dollar wine and discounted cocktails from 6 to 7 p.m.

Circle Bar's reopening is one part of this year's Main Street changes. A few blocks away, an all-day café is opening from Mindy and Vinny Kinne, whose sixth restaurant this is and whose first in Santa Monica. It's built to shift from brunch into handmade pasta, Neapolitan pizza and a rotation of Pan-Asian dishes as the day goes on, with a hidden patio behind the dining room, described as a secret garden, that seats fifty to sixty people around a fireplace and a water feature. Vinny Kinne told the Santa Monica Daily Press, "We came here because we believe in Main Street." Down the block, La Diperie, a soft-serve concept out of 2441 Main Street, is set to open by the end of summer, right around now.

Together, the returning dive bar, new café and planned ice cream shop add to a corridor that also has a barbershop and a Tai Chi studio.

City measures approved in March

On March 26, 2026, the Santa Monica City Council approved a package of economic development measures the city is calling its Realignment Plan Update. One measure in the announcement affecting Main Street is the expansion of the Entertainment Zone's event-based authority beyond downtown. The program, first launched in June 2025 on the Third Street Promenade as the first of its kind in Southern California, is expanding to cover the Santa Monica Pier, Montana Avenue, and Main Street.

The expansion places Main Street among the corridors covered by the city's event-based program. The same package eliminated fees for restaurants using simple table-and-chair outdoor dining setups, a change the city says could apply to as many as 59 restaurants citywide, and waived the wastewater capacity fee for new restaurant projects, worth roughly $1,000 per seat, which erases $50,000 in city fees for a fifty-seat restaurant. A new three-million-dollar Economic Development Fund is earmarked partly for restaurant attraction incentives on corridors like this one. Mayor Caroline Torosis framed the whole package as "filling our storefronts, activating our streets."

The city's expanded program coincided with activity on Main Street this year. On August 23, the Main Street Farmers Market partnered with the Ocean Park Association and the Main Street Business Improvement Association to close off a stretch of the street entirely for a full day of community programming. The dive bar reopening and the café with the secret garden were among the year's other changes.

Restaurant operators with established track records

The operators moving onto Main Street this year have restaurant experience elsewhere. The Kinnes are opening their sixth location. Circle Bar's new owners already run Hinano Cafe. Chef Dave Beran's Seline and Pasjoli have also put Main Street on a national food map, and his portfolio now includes a Michelin star and a James Beard Award.

Pasjoli, at 2732 Main Street, opened in 2019 and earned its Michelin star in 2021 on the strength of a pressed duck prepared table-side in the traditional style, with dinners running $90 to $140 a head. Seline, Beran's newer tasting-menu room in the Ocean Park end of Main Street, opened in December 2024, landed on the Michelin Guide within months, and in June 2026 won Beran the James Beard Award for Best Chef: California. That win has made Seline's fourteen-to-eighteen-course, $295 tasting menu hard to book on short notice, with tables now running three to four weeks out. Pasjoli's a la carte room is the more accessible way into Beran's cooking, though tables there also run two to three weeks out.

Beran's cooking has earned its reputation, and the Kinnes have an established track record. These openings coincide with the city's recent approval of measures for event programming and restaurant attraction incentives on corridors including Main Street.

What it actually changes if you live near it

For a resident, the practical shifts are small but worth knowing. If Seline or Pasjoli is part of your plan for a birthday dinner or an out-of-town guest, book further ahead than you would have a year ago. The Circle Bar's Power Hour, five-dollar wine and discounted cocktails from 6 to 7 p.m., is worth building into an early weeknight stop if you want the reopened room without the later crowd. The Main Street Farmers Market still runs its regular Sunday hours, 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., but this year that market has shown it can expand into a full street event with less notice than before, so it's worth checking before you plan around it.

The version of Main Street that "stayed the same" is real in the sense that matters most to daily life: you can still get a five-dollar glass of wine at a dive bar that's been there since before the neighborhood had a name for itself, and a farmers market that still opens at 8:30 on Sunday morning. Main Street is among the corridors covered by the city's expanded Entertainment Zone, and the street has seen openings and reopenings by experienced restaurant operators this year.

If this stretch of Santa Monica is where you already spend your weekends, that's context worth having the next time someone tells you Main Street never changes. And if you're weighing a move onto or off this corridor, or you're ready to sell a home near it, Team Pinckert has spent years walking these blocks and can talk you through what a street like this is actually worth right now. List Your Home with a team that knows the Main Street corridor and its changing character.

This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.