For four decades, Martha's has meant one thing in the South Bay: get there before the wait gets long, order the breakfast burrito, and be out the door by early afternoon. The Hermosa Beach original, sitting at 22nd Street and Hermosa Avenue since 1984, never served past 3 p.m. If you wanted Martha's after dark, you didn't get it. You went somewhere else.
That changed this year. Martha's opened a second location at 1810 S. Catalina Avenue in Redondo Beach's Riviera Village, and for the first time in the brand's history, it stays open for dinner. The move says less about one restaurant expanding and more about a decision the Redondo Beach City Council made months earlier, one that most residents walking past the new patio furniture on Catalina Avenue probably never connected to their evening plans.
What Actually Opened, and Where
The new Martha's took over the space last occupied by Gabi James, the Spanish-French restaurant that closed in late April after an eight-year run. It's a bigger footprint than the Hermosa original, split across two floors, with room upstairs the Martha's team had been chasing for years to finally offer private dining for groups and events. Dinner service runs 5 to 9 p.m., led by chef Johnny De Vivo, who previously ran the kitchen at Rolling Hills Country Club. The evening menu leans into comfort food built for a neighborhood crowd: burgers, ribs, steak, pasta, short ribs. It's a different register than the breakfast burrito, and that's the point. The Hermosa location still does mornings only. The Riviera Village location does the whole day.
For a Village restaurant to open with a coffee counter, a lunch crowd, and a dinner service under one name is not how this stretch of Catalina Avenue has typically worked. Most of the district's restaurants specialize by daypart. Martha's decided not to.
Hilary Condren, who co-owns the brand with his team, put the choice of location in plain terms:
"Their downtown, their heartbeat is on fire."
That's Condren's read on Redondo's commercial core, and it's worth sitting with, because it wasn't the food scene that drew him across the city line from Hermosa. It was something the city itself had just locked in.
The Vote That Made the Difference
Here's the part that doesn't show up on the new restaurant's sign. Around the same time Martha's was finalizing its lease, the Redondo Beach City Council voted to extend the Riviera Village outdoor dining deck program for another five years. That's not a small technical renewal. Since the pandemic, most beach cities built temporary parklettes, the barricaded curbside seating that let restaurants keep tables outside when indoor capacity was restricted, and most of those cities have since been quietly dismantling them as emergency authorizations expired. Redondo Beach did the opposite. It made its version permanent enough to plan around.
For an operator deciding where to put a five-year lease and a two-floor buildout, that difference matters more than it sounds. A restaurant expanding into outdoor seating on a month-to-month permit is making a bet. A restaurant expanding into outdoor seating backed by a five-year council commitment is making a plan. Condren has said as much: the extended program is part of what made Riviera Village feel like the right next step for a brand that had spent forty years building loyalty up the coast in Hermosa.
This is the piece worth understanding if you already live in the Village or nearby in South Redondo, the Hollywood Riviera, or Hermosa. The restaurant on Catalina Avenue isn't the story by itself. The story is that your neighborhood's outdoor dining infrastructure is now a five-year fixture rather than a pandemic leftover, and that stability is starting to pull established South Bay names across city lines rather than pushing them to open somewhere brand new.
What a Tuesday Actually Looks Like Now
If you live within walking distance of Catalina Avenue, here's what's concretely different from a year ago:
- Morning: coffee and the breakfast burrito, same as always, just now available on either side of the Hermosa-Redondo line.
- Midday: a lunch option that didn't specialize in lunch before, now sitting between Fringe and Redondo Beach Brew on the same block.
- Evening: a dinner seat at a restaurant that, six months ago, would have already had its lights off and chairs stacked by the time you got off work.
None of that required a new building or a rezoning fight. It required one restaurant deciding that a full day of service was worth the investment, and a city council deciding that outdoor seating wasn't going away in eighteen months.
The Neighbors Who Didn't Move
Part of what makes this expansion feel like an addition rather than a disruption is that nothing around it changed. Fringe and Redondo Beach Brew, the two businesses flanking the new Martha's, are still there, still running the same programs they were running before a new neighbor moved in next door. The Riviera Village Summer Festival, now in its 48th year, drew its usual three-day crowd to Catalina Avenue and Avenida del Norte this past June, the same footprint of streets that's hosted it for decades. The commercial district built around Riviera Village in 1954 is still recognizably itself.
That continuity is worth pointing out because it's easy to read any restaurant opening as a sign the neighborhood is turning over. This one isn't. It's closer to the opposite: an established South Bay brand, the kind that survives forty years by not changing much, chose to grow into a district it judged stable enough to bet on for the long run. The dining deck extension is one piece of evidence for that judgment. The fact that Fringe and Redondo Beach Brew didn't need to make room, that the Summer Festival didn't need to reroute, is another.
What This Means If You Live Here
You don't need to be thinking about buying or selling anything to notice that your options changed this year. If your Tuesday night routine has been driving to Hermosa or further up the coast because nothing in walking distance stayed open, that's no longer strictly true. A restaurant that's been part of the South Bay's morning rhythm for forty years is now part of its evening rhythm too, and it happened because the city made a five-year commitment to the sidewalk seating that makes a Village dinner service work in the first place.
Riviera Village isn't becoming a different neighborhood. It's becoming a more complete version of the one that's been here since 1954, with an outdoor dining infrastructure now stable enough that established South Bay operators are choosing to build their next chapter on Catalina Avenue instead of somewhere newer and less proven.
If you've lived in this stretch of the South Bay for a while and you're the kind of person who tracks these shifts, whether you're weighing what your own property is worth against a changing commercial corridor or simply curious how a policy decision at city hall turns into a dinner reservation two blocks from your house, The Pennel Group spends its time paying attention to exactly this kind of detail across Los Angeles and the coastal communities that surround it. Request a Confidential Consultation if you'd like to talk through what it means for the block you live on.
