Walk north up Vermont Avenue from Franklin toward Hollywood Boulevard some evening this week and you will pass a phone-lit sidewalk crowd waiting for a table at Vandell, a hand-lettered sign in the window at Old Gold Tomato Pie, and, at the corner where Vermont meets Hollywood, a car wash whose replacement cleared its final city approval about a year ago and still hasn't broken ground. That corner is the whole story here. Los Feliz Village can put you at a jazz bar, a 1923 movie palace, and three new restaurants without ever getting in a car. It still cannot put you in front of a bag of groceries. That contradiction is finally getting resolved, and the way it's getting resolved says more about how this neighborhood actually works than any list of new restaurant openings on its own would.
Three new doors, one old instinct
The restaurant news broke last winter and it's held up since. Wilde's, the British-leaning spot serving sausage rolls and Welsh rarebit, opened last October to lines that had nothing to do with tourists passing through. Vandell, the cocktail bar that took over the old Nossa Caipirinha Bar space on Hillhurst Avenue after that bar closed at the end of 2024, opened last December, and as of this past winter its owners were still describing the crowds as going strong. Old Gold Tomato Pie, the thick-crust pizza counter, rounds out what food writers covering Los Angeles were calling a restaurant boom concentrated almost entirely inside this one walkable strip.
What's easy to miss in a roundup of openings is what the people running these places actually say about why they picked Los Feliz. Jeff Vance, who owns Old Gold, has been direct about it: he wanted the people who live and work in the neighborhood to be his first customers, not a citywide crowd chasing a new opening. He's watched that play out in practice, with the same regulars returning and bringing their kids. His read on why the location works has nothing to do with buzz and everything to do with foot traffic that already exists: Los Feliz is a rare pocket of a car-centric city where people actually live and work within walking distance of each other, and he sees it firsthand when someone leaves a movie at the Vista Theatre or ducks out of the bookstore around the corner and stops in for a slice on the way home.
Vandell's owners tell a similar story from a different angle. Michael Francesconi and Matthew Glaser, the team behind Park Hospitality who also run Donna's in Echo Park, brought in Republique alumni Vay Su and Shawn Lickliter to build the bar program, then made a deliberately old-fashioned choice: the room runs largely on walk-ins, with a maître d' managing the door and a waitlist for anyone who shows up without a reservation. That's a bet that the neighborhood generates enough of its own traffic to fill the room without needing a citywide reservation push. Sara Kramer, who opened Kismet on Hollywood Boulevard back in 2017, put it simply when asked about the new arrivals: more neighbors, including newer imports like the tea shop Kettl, just means more of the same energy she's already glad to have next door.
None of this is really new for the Village. The Dresden has been pouring drinks and running its lounge since 1954. Ye Rustic Inn has been serving pub food since 1971. Little Dom's has been doing chicken parm and martinis since 2008. What's changed is the pace, not the pattern: new operators keep choosing this same few blocks because the density of people already living within them makes a restaurant viable without ever needing to become a destination.
Here's the shorthand version of what opened, and where:
- Wilde's — British-style fare, sausage rolls and Welsh rarebit, opened last October
- Vandell — cocktail bar on Hillhurst Avenue, in the former Nossa Caipirinha Bar space, opened last December, run by Park Hospitality (also behind Donna's in Echo Park)
- Old Gold Tomato Pie — thick-crust pizza by the slice, owned by Jeff Vance, part of the same wave
The corner that's been empty longer than any restaurant wait list
While three storefronts were filling with regulars, the lot at 1666 North Vermont Avenue, right where Vermont meets Hollywood Boulevard, has been going through a slower kind of change. It's a car wash today, and before the car wash it was, for years, the site of Machos Tacos. What's coming next has been through two rounds of city review. The Los Angeles City Planning Commission upheld approval of a seven-story, 139-unit mixed-use building for the site in October 2024, an appeal followed, and the Los Angeles City Council upheld that approval on the appeal in October 2025. Nearly a year later, the project still has the green light but no visible construction. The developer is Benny Pirian of Vermont Real Estate LLC, and architect Daryoush Safai designed a contemporary podium building with a courtyard facing the Hollywood Boulevard frontage.
The unit count alone doesn't tell the interesting part of this story. The building qualified for Transit Oriented Communities incentives, which let it rise larger than standard zoning would otherwise permit, and in exchange 16 of the 139 apartments are set aside as affordable housing at the extremely-low-income level for 55 years. There's parking for 145 vehicles built in. And on the ground floor, replacing the car wash bays, is a grocery store.
That last detail is the one that actually changes daily life here. Los Feliz Village has never lacked for things to do on foot. It has the Vista Theatre, bought by Quentin Tarantino in 2021 and reopened on November 17, 2023, after a full renovation that turned it into a film-only house running one of the few working VistaVision projectors left anywhere. It has a business improvement district counting more than 300 merchants along Hillhurst and Vermont. What it has never had, at least not within that same walk, is a place to buy dinner ingredients rather than dinner itself. A ground-floor grocery closes that gap directly, and it does it at the exact spot where the Village's foot traffic already funnels toward Hollywood Boulevard.
This isn't happening in isolation, either. Two buildings at the foot of nearby Barnsdall Park were completed by LaTerra Development, and a separate project from Lazer Properties was moving through approvals on the north side of Hollywood Boulevard as of last year. The corridor between Los Feliz Village and Barnsdall has been absorbing new housing in more than one spot at once, which is worth knowing if you've noticed construction fencing on your regular walk and wondered whether it was just the one project.
What actually changes for the Village
Put the two threads together and the shape of the story gets clearer than either one on its own. Three restaurant owners chose Los Feliz over the past year specifically because enough people already live and work within walking distance to sustain a room without a citywide marketing push. In that same stretch of time, the city cleared the final appeal on a project that will put a grocery store inside that same walk for the first time. One is proof the neighborhood already functions the way a walkable place should. The other is the market finally filling in the one piece that foot traffic alone couldn't solve.
None of this changes what Los Feliz Village has always been good at: a low, human-scaled stretch of 1920s storefronts where a movie at the Vista, a pizza slice at Old Gold, and a drink at Vandell can all happen on the same short walk. What it does mean is that walk is about to cover a little more ground, and if you've been driving out of the neighborhood for the weekly grocery run out of habit, that habit has an expiration date now, even if the exact timeline for construction hasn't been set.
If you're already living here and keeping half an eye on how the Village keeps changing without losing what makes it work, that's exactly the kind of local read Maureen Pearson tracks block by block. Let's Connect if you ever want to talk through what a project like this actually means for a specific street, not just the neighborhood in general.
