The line for Vandell started forming before the doors even opened. When the new cocktail bar on Hillhurst Avenue opened in December 2025, it pulled crowds long enough that regulars started treating the wait as part of the plan rather than an inconvenience. That is by design. Vandell runs largely as a walk-in room, with only a handful of reservations released through Resy and three experienced hosts, including a maître d', managing whoever shows up. In a neighborhood where street parking disappears by seven on a weeknight, a bar built around people arriving on foot and being willing to wander for twenty minutes is a small bet with a specific logic behind it.
That logic is the story worth telling about Los Feliz right now. Look at this year's openings one at a time and it reads like a normal restaurant cycle: a bar here, a coffee chain there, a car wash turning into apartments. Look at them together and a pattern shows up. Almost nothing here is getting built from scratch. What's changing is who's behind the counter and what they're betting the block still wants.
The Village That Doesn't Expand
Vermont Avenue's business district has looked roughly the same size since it was a streetcar suburb. The Los Feliz Improvement Association keeps the record, and it traces back to a single commercial building at the corner of Vermont and Prospect around 1903, back when the street was still dirt and lined with pepper trees. Most of the storefronts that give the Village its character today went up between 1922 and 1940, and they are still standing at the same height, on the same tight blocks. A building that held a pharmacy or a five-and-dime a century ago now holds a wine bar or a bookstore, but the shell never changed.
That matters because it sets the terms for how new operators can enter. There's no lot to build a bigger footprint on, no strip-mall pad site to fill. If you want in, you take over what's already there, at the scale it already comes in. Vandell didn't build a room. It moved into the space that Nossa Caipirinha Bar had occupied until it closed at the end of 2024, on the same stretch of Hillhurst it had always occupied.
The New Doors on Hillhurst
That's the shape of nearly every opening this year:
- Vandell (1966 Hillhurst Avenue) — Michael Francesconi and Matthew Glaser of Park Hospitality, the team behind Donna's in Echo Park, partnered with Republique cocktail alums Vay Su and Shawn Lickliter to take over the closed Nossa Caipirinha space. The menu runs about a dozen shareable dishes built to support drinking rather than compete with it, not a restaurant in disguise.
- Wilde's (1850 Hillhurst Avenue) — an all-day restaurant announced by first-time owners Tatiana Ettensberger and Natasha Price, set to replace Thai on Hillhurst with coffee and pastries in the morning, lunch by day, and dinner service at night. As of last summer the pair were still hiring for front and back of house without a firm opening date locked in, so it remains the project neighbors keep watching the windows for.
- Philz Coffee — arriving on a stretch of Hillhurst that already supports Starbucks Reserve, Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, Blue Bottle, Cafe Los Feliz, Alcove, and homegrown roaster Maru Coffee. That puts seven coffee options inside roughly a ten-minute walk, a density that says less about coffee demand and more about what kind of business a small storefront on this street can reliably support.
- Encanto — relaunched as a wood-fired Baja Coastal kitchen on Hillhurst near the Greek Theatre and Griffith Observatory, running daily happy hour and full dinner service Tuesday through Sunday.
- Civico — a second location from brothers Dario and Pietro Gallo, following their restaurant's run in San Diego, bringing another Italian kitchen into the same few blocks.
None of these needed new construction. They needed an existing address, a liquor license, and a bet that the block's foot traffic still had room for one more idea. Glaser put it plainly when explaining why the Vandell team chose this stretch of Hillhurst over anywhere else in the city: they had all been talking about Los Feliz being their top choice, so it felt like kismet.
The One Building That Actually Is New
There is exactly one project this year that doesn't fit the take-over-the-storefront pattern, and it sits at the Village's southern edge rather than inside it. The Los Angeles City Council upheld approval for a seven-story, 139-unit building at 1666 N. Vermont Avenue, replacing a car wash at the corner of Vermont and Hollywood. The project, from Benny Pirian of Vermont Real Estate LLC and designed by Daryoush Safai, includes a ground-floor grocery store and parking for 145 vehicles, and uses Transit Oriented Communities incentives to build larger than the site's base zoning would otherwise allow. In exchange, 16 of the apartments are set aside as affordable housing for 55 years.
The detail worth sitting with is the grocery store on the ground floor. A neighborhood that already runs most of its errands on foot has been missing a full grocery anchor at that end of the Village, and putting one at the corner where the walkable core meets Hollywood Boulevard extends that core rather than competing with it. It is new construction, but it is new construction built to serve the same car-optional pattern the rest of the Village runs on. Even the one project that broke from the take-over-a-storefront rule ended up reinforcing the reason that rule exists.
The Calendar Is Filling In Too
The turnover isn't only happening inside buildings. It's happening on the calendar. Los Feliz Flea has split its schedule across two locations: it returned to its original home at Our Mother of Good Counsel, 2060 N. Vermont Ave., running the 1st, 3rd, and 5th Saturday of the month from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., while continuing its run at Vintage Land on Alpine Street on the 2nd and 4th Saturday. Layered on top of that, the Los Feliz Village Farmers Market began running Fridays from 3 to 8 p.m. starting last October, giving the Village a produce market on a day it hadn't had one before.
Read against the restaurant turnover, this is the same instinct showing up in a different register. More scheduled reasons to be on foot on more days of the week, spread across storefronts and a parking lot that already existed, rather than a single new destination built to pull people in from outside the neighborhood.
The Gap Everyone Names
Ask a longtime resident what the Village actually needs and the answer rarely matches what's opening. One decade-long Hillhurst resident summed up the coffee situation without much enthusiasm: it's very saturated, and locals are lucky to have that much coffee so close by. Another resident interviewed on the same stretch said he'd rather see more bars return, noting how many had closed during the pandemic and never came back.
That gap is exactly what Vandell and Wilde's are trying to close, one from an experienced hospitality group and one from first-time owners chasing a childhood idea. The neighborhood didn't need a fourth espresso option nearly as much as it needed somewhere to end up after nine on a Tuesday. The operators paying attention to that distinction are the ones picking the empty storefronts worth taking a chance on.
What This Means If You Already Live Here
None of this changes the footprint of the Village. The buildings will still be the same height next year, on the same blocks, at the same distance from Griffith Park. What changes is what's behind each door, and increasingly, whether that door expects you to have called ahead. The neighborhood isn't getting bigger. It's getting more particular about who it lets fill in the spaces it already has.
If you're weighing what a stretch like this means for a property here, whether you're planning to sell, buy, or just understand what your block's turnover says about its trajectory, the team at RSR Real Estate spends its days reading these same signals on the ground in Los Feliz and across central LA. Reach out to request a private consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
