Walk down Pier Avenue any night this month and dinner service is underway at Brick and Mortar, in the exact storefront that spent seventeen years as Waterman's Safe House for Surfers, the bar Jeff Bellandi, a former AVP volleyball player, opened in 2008 for the local surf crowd. The sign came down last August. Whoever walks in today expecting another beach bar finds something else entirely.
That single storefront tells you most of what you need to know about Pier Plaza this fall. But the more interesting fact isn't that the plaza is trading bars for restaurants. It's who keeps showing up on the other side of the lease.
What Changed, and What's Still Coming
Brick and Mortar belongs to Justin Safier, who already owns Vista, the restaurant directly across the plaza from that old Waterman's address. His chef at the new spot, Andrew Adams, also runs the kitchen at Vista. Safier built the concept around the century-old art deco bones of the Pier Plaza building, closer to a Roaring Twenties Palm Springs room than a beach bar, with a menu that changes quarterly with the produce. It runs lunch, dinner, and weekend brunch, seven days a week, a different rhythm than a surf bar that mostly worked Friday and Saturday nights.
A few blocks over, Tiki Kai has been doing the same thing in reverse: bringing an established operator's playbook to a plaza address instead of a plaza address to a new operator. It sits at 73 Pier Ave, behind a fourteen-foot tiki mask hand-carved by Peter Asmar of Asmar Studios, with an interior built out by Davis Ink, and has been open since late last year. The hospitality team behind it, Brian Eldridge, Patrick Mescall, Dennis Doody, and Alex Osorio, already runs The Hula Hula Room, Eat at Joe's, Paddy O'Brien's Irish Pub, and The Bounty Room elsewhere in the South Bay. Tiki Kai wasn't a new operator testing Hermosa. It was an established one adding another address to a list they already had.
Two more storefronts are in the same category, just earlier in the process. Playa Hermosa Fish & Oyster Co. was slated to give way to Kasamar, a coastal seafood and tavern concept from co-founder Stephanie De Los Santos, with an opening window of August this year, meaning it may already be seating guests by the time you read this. Down toward Hermosa Avenue, the former Slay Hermosa space has been lined up for a while to become Sushi Bar, an omakase concept built around tightly curated tasting menus, though no firm opening date has surfaced yet. When it lands, Hermosa will have two serious Japanese-forward rooms within a five-minute walk of each other, since RYLA already occupies 1220 Hermosa Avenue with a menu from husband-and-wife chefs Ray Hayashi and Cynthia Hetlinger.
That's four storefronts in roughly the same stretch of blocks, and in every case the person or team behind the new concept was already running a restaurant somewhere nearby before they took on the new address.
Why This Round of Openings Doesn't Look Like the Last One
Hermosa's city council has historically been careful about full liquor licenses, worried that a restaurant with one will slide into functioning as a bar late at night. Reporting from Easy Reader News, the South Bay's hyperlocal paper, on the Pier Plaza turnover noted that restaurant broker Tony Cordi has argued the high-end, chef-driven concepts deserve an exception, on the grounds that they're better run and last longer than straight nightlife spots. Part of what convinced the council, according to that same reporting, is that these operators have agreed to earlier closing times in exchange for the license, trading late-night hours for the ability to run a real wine and cocktail program with dinner.
That trade only works if the operator has already proven they can run a kitchen somewhere else in town. A newcomer with no track record in Hermosa is a harder sell to a council that remembers exactly how a bar-heavy plaza behaves at 1 a.m. Safier's history with Vista, the tiki team's four existing South Bay spots, the sushi and omakase operators expanding a format that already works one block over: none of this is outside capital discovering Hermosa for the first time. It's the same small group of local restaurant people redeploying into space that bars vacate, using the credibility they already built to get licenses that a first-time operator likely wouldn't.
Vin Folk is the clearest evidence that the bet is paying off. The Hermosa Avenue restaurant, run by executive chef Kevin De Los Santos and chef-partner Katya Shastova, holds a Bib Gourmand listing in the Michelin Guide USA, the kind of recognition that used to be rare this far south of the Westside. A table at 7:30 on a Saturday has gotten hard to walk into.
What Hasn't Moved
None of this displaces the places that were never nightlife to begin with. Martha's, at 22nd Street and Hermosa Avenue, has been open for breakfast and lunch since 1984 and still runs 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily, champagne brunch included. Baran's 2239, tucked into a small mall a few blocks off the sand, is still run by the Baran brothers, Jonathan and Jason, with more than 100 wines by the bottle and 40-plus beers on a farmhouse-table menu that rewards a slower, quieter dinner. AttaGirl, at 1238 Hermosa Avenue from chefs Alice Mai and David LeFevre, has been drawing some of the loudest reviews on the strip with its wood-grilled menu.
These places were the proof of concept before Pier Plaza's bars started converting. They didn't need the current wave of openings to justify their existence, and they're not competing with Brick and Mortar or Kasamar so much as setting the standard those newer rooms are trying to match.
Here's the actual state of the block, as of this month:
- Already open: Brick and Mortar (former Waterman's space, Pier Plaza), Tiki Kai (73 Pier Ave), Vin Folk (Hermosa Avenue, Michelin Bib Gourmand), RYLA (1220 Hermosa Ave), AttaGirl (1238 Hermosa Ave), Baran's 2239, Martha's (22nd and Hermosa Ave)
- Expected soon, no confirmed opening yet: Kasamar, replacing Playa Hermosa Fish & Oyster Co.; Sushi Bar, in the former Slay Hermosa location
A resident who hasn't walked Pier Avenue since Fiesta Hermosa's Labor Day weekend run, which closed out on September 7, is still going to find a different lineup than the one from a couple of summers ago. The Waterman's sign coming down was the most visible marker of that change, but it's not the story by itself. The story is that Hermosa's restaurant scene has been built out by people who already had a stake in it, one storefront at a time, and the council has let them do it precisely because they'd already shown they could.
If you're curious what this kind of shift on Pier Plaza tends to mean for property near it, The Art of Beach Real Estate is happy to talk through it. Schedule a private consultation with Gary.
