Walk down Catalina Avenue past Fringe and you used to hit a dark storefront where Gabi James spent eight years serving Spanish-French plates before closing in late April. Now the space between Fringe and Redondo Beach Brew holds something different: a two-story build-out with a redesigned dining room downstairs and a private event floor above, operating under a name that has nothing to do with Redondo Beach at all. It says Martha's on the sign, the same Martha's that has been serving breakfast burritos at 22nd Street and Hermosa Avenue since 1984.
That single fact, a 40-year-old Hermosa Beach institution choosing Riviera Village for its first expansion, is worth more than a passing mention on a neighborhood roundup. It tells you something about what city leaders decided to do with a piece of pandemic-era policy that most of the South Bay's beach towns quietly let expire.
A Breakfast Spot That Never Served Dinner Just Started
Here is the detail that would surprise even someone who has ordered the Top Dish White Corn Scramble at the original Hermosa location a hundred times: Martha's has never served dinner. The Hermosa Avenue restaurant runs breakfast and lunch only, open daily from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., and closes for the day before the sun goes down.
The Redondo Beach location breaks that pattern entirely. It runs the familiar 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. breakfast and lunch service, then reopens at 5 p.m. for dinner until 9 p.m., seven nights a week. That is not a copy-paste expansion. It is a genuinely new version of the brand, built inside a 5,000-square-foot building with enough square footage to support a full dinner menu on the ground floor and a private dining room upstairs that can seat 80 for a banquet or 100 for a cocktail-style event.
The kitchen behind that dinner service has its own local pedigree. Martha's brought on Johnny De Vivo, who previously worked as executive chef at Rolling Hills Country Club, to run the expanded menu. For a restaurant that built four decades of loyalty on brunch alone, hiring a country club chef to helm an evening service is a statement about how seriously the ownership group is treating this location, not as a satellite outpost but as a second flagship.
The Owner's Own Explanation
Co-owner Hilary Condren, who took over the Martha's brand about a decade ago, has been candid about why Riviera Village won out over the dozen other coastal strips his team could have picked. He and his partners are actively scouting three more locations over the next three years, with a range that stretches from Santa Barbara down to San Diego. Riviera Village was the first stop on that list, ahead of any city further up or down the coast.
Condren put it simply when he talked about what drew him south from Hermosa. "Their downtown, their heartbeat is on fire," he said of Redondo Beach's Riviera Village. For an operator who spent years managing a single Hermosa Beach location through a pandemic that forced restaurant owners everywhere to rethink fixed costs, that kind of confidence in a neighborhood's foot traffic and long-term direction is not thrown around casually.
The Five-Year Bet Underneath the Booth Seats
The timing of Condren's decision lines up with a policy choice that most residents may have missed entirely. While other beach cities have largely dismantled the temporary outdoor dining structures they permitted during the pandemic, the Redondo Beach City Council voted this year to extend Riviera Village's outdoor dining deck program for the next five years.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. A restaurant deciding whether to invest in a two-floor build-out, hire a dedicated dinner chef, and construct a private event space is making a bet on regulatory stability as much as on foot traffic. A one-year outdoor dining permit that could vanish with the next council vote does not justify that kind of capital commitment. A five-year runway does. Condren has said as much directly, describing the extension as part of what keeps Riviera Village feeling like an energetic place to build a second location rather than a seasonal opportunity to chase.
That is the part of this story that a simple "new restaurant opens" post misses entirely. Martha's did not pick Redondo Beach because the demographics penciled out on a spreadsheet. It picked Redondo Beach because the city government made a five-year commitment that its neighbors did not, and an operator with three more locations to place along the California coast noticed.
What a Walk Down Catalina Avenue Looks Like Now
Martha's did not arrive in an empty stretch. It sits between Fringe and Redondo Beach Brew, a few doors from Riviera House, the craft cocktail bar that has anchored 1708 S. Catalina Avenue since 2019, and within a block of King Harbor Brewing Company, HT Grill, and Hook & Plow. That is a dense run of independently owned food and drink businesses on a single commercial street, the kind of density that tends to compound: each new opening gives residents another reason to park once and stay for hours rather than driving in for a single reservation.
The Village's rhythm around Martha's arrival has stayed consistent with the rest of the year. The 48th annual Riviera Village Summer Festival filled Catalina Avenue, Avenue I, Avenida del Norte, and Vista del Mar in late June, drawing the kind of three-day crowd that has shown up for the event for nearly five decades. The Sunday farmers market still runs from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the triangle parking lot at 1801 S. Elena Avenue, across from Trader Joe's, giving residents a reason to be in the neighborhood before Martha's even opens its doors for breakfast.
None of that existed because of Martha's. All of it is part of the reason Martha's picked this particular half-mile of Catalina Avenue over anywhere else on its expansion list.
The Actual Takeaway
The easy version of this story is that a beloved Hermosa Beach brunch spot opened a second location a few miles south. The more useful version, the one that tells you something about where Redondo Beach is headed rather than just what happened, is that an operator with real leverage, three more coastal locations to place and cities from Santa Barbara to San Diego competing for his attention, chose Riviera Village specifically because Redondo Beach's city council made a longer-term commitment to outdoor dining than its neighbors did. That is not atmosphere. That is a business reading a policy decision correctly and acting on it before most residents even noticed the vote happened.
If you already live near Catalina Avenue, that is worth knowing next time you walk past the old Gabi James space, now with a full bar, a dinner menu, and an upstairs room built for the kind of private event a breakfast-only cafe could never host. If you are thinking about your own place in this stretch of the South Bay, whether you already own here or are watching from outside, the same local read that told Condren where to place his next restaurant is the kind of insight Amy Pearce brings to every buyer and seller conversation in Redondo Beach and the surrounding coastal communities. If you want a clearer picture of where your own property sits in that story, start with a free home valuation or take a closer look at the Redondo Beach neighborhood page to see what else is shaping the Village right now.
