The last time Brentwood's summer felt this front-loaded, the Country Mart was still selling penny candy. This year the neighborhood has two clocks running at once. One is counting down to the Getty Center's first full closure since it opened in 1997. The other just started ticking on San Vicente, where a food hall none of us asked for turned out to be the thing everyone is walking to.
For residents, the practical effect is a compressed season. The cultural anchor at the top of the hill has an expiration date on it, and the daily gravity at the bottom of the hill has shifted about three blocks. Everything worth doing this summer sits inside that geometry.
The San Vicente Reset
The most consequential change on the boulevard is not a new tenant so much as a new format. Neighborly opened its Brentwood location on April 11 at 11770 San Vicente, and the pitch is genuinely different from a restaurant row: four independent kitchens plus a gourmet market, all under one order.
The lineup is worth naming because the names are the point. Gaby Dalkin's Gaby's runs the California side with Caesar avocado wraps and the Chinese chicken crunch salad. Mini Kabob, the Martirosyan family's Mediterranean grill that has landed repeatedly on the Los Angeles Times "101 Best Restaurants" list, brings the wrap and the plate that regulars have been driving to Glendale for. Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson's Mixtape does gluten-free, seed-oil-free fried chicken and the OGB Royale cheeseburger. Frank Pinello, of Brooklyn's Best Pizza, opened his West Coast slice concept, Palermo Pizza Club, in the same room. If you have ever tried to feed four people from four different cravings on a Tuesday, the format solves a real domestic problem.
A few doors over, Savta expanded from the Original Farmers Market to a second, larger Brentwood location at 906 S. Barrington Ave. The hand roll list carries over from the original, including tuna with truffle and jalapeño, red snapper with yuzu kosho and cilantro, and the uni-caviar-toro combination. The weekday lunch set of an appetizer and three hand rolls at $32 is the number to know. In a corridor where a single omakase seat easily runs three figures at dinner, a sit-down lunch under forty dollars is the kind of arithmetic that changes how often a weekday errand turns into a meal.
The interesting question isn't whether Neighborly is a good restaurant. It's what happens to the block when a food hall with four working chefs opens between the pilates studios and the pharmacy.
Off The 405, One Last Summer
The Getty Center will close on March 15, 2027 for its first major renovation since it opened in 1997, and it plans to reopen in spring 2028, in time for the Los Angeles Summer Olympics. Which means summer 2026 is the last Off the 405 most of us will see for two years.
The lineup is compact by design. Five Saturday evenings, DJ at six, live set at seven-thirty, courtyard views over the Sepulveda Pass.
- May 30 — aja monet, the surrealist blues poet whose 2023 debut album was nominated for a Grammy for best spoken word poetry album
- June — Hunx and His Punx
- July — Leenalchi and Horse Lords on separate nights
- August 22 — Laurel Halo, closing the series
Admission is free and so is parking after 6 p.m. on show nights, but tickets tend to open about three weeks ahead of each show and go quickly. The upside for anyone who lives within the 90049 grid: you can leave your car at home and walk the tram from the lot at the bottom.
The 2026 galleries are still worth the reservation independent of the concerts. Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985 is the museum's headline exhibition, organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and it presents around 150 photographs from artists including Carrie Mae Weems, Gordon Parks, Ming Smith, and Emory Douglas.
Sundays At 741 Gretna Green
Two farmers markets bear the name "Brentwood" in California and only one of them is ours. The certified market at 741 South Gretna Green Way runs every Sunday from 9 a.m. through the early afternoon, and this year the summer stretch runs continuously through August 30.
It is small on purpose. Stone fruit season is the argument for showing up in July, and the market has been leaning into it. If you have not been in a year, you will notice the ratio has shifted toward prepared foods and baked goods, which is either an improvement or a betrayal depending on how you feel about waiting in a line for cardamom buns before your first coffee.
What The Country Mart Is Actually Programming
The Brentwood Country Mart at 225 26th Street has been running its 1948 barn-shaped playbook for so long that it is easy to skim past what it is actually doing on the calendar. This summer the answer is more than usual.
Wednesday mornings at 11, Cassidy Preschool hosts Mart Littles Story Time in the courtyard. The series runs from mid-May through the end of August, which effectively gives every parent in the ZIP code a free hour of programming in walking distance for the full break. On Sunday, June 21, the courtyard did root beer floats and Farmshop fried chicken for Father's Day. The Mart also opens the courtyard for televised international matches during the summer sports calendar, most recently a USA vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina viewing.
None of this is programming that shows up on the mainstream event feeds. It is calibrated to residents, which is a useful signal in a shopping center often written up as a destination. The rotating retail is doing the same job. Varley's opening and the Trading Post's pop-ups run on the same six to eight week rhythm as the Mart's food events, which is the closest thing Brentwood has to a shared communal cadence.
The Compressed Calendar
Add it up and the shape of the season becomes visible. The Getty's Saturday-night program is a five-date arc with a defined end. The Country Mart's Wednesday morning slot is a fifteen-week loop. The farmers market is a thirteen-week Sunday. Neighborly and Savta are the two new weeknight anchors. Everything else this summer either fits inside those beats or competes with them for attention.
That is not the way Brentwood normally feels. In most years the neighborhood functions as a launchpad, a place people drive out of on a Saturday to reach the beach, a museum on the other side of the 405, a restaurant in West Hollywood. This summer runs the opposite direction. The reason to leave the house is closer than the reason to leave the neighborhood.
The corollary matters for anyone paying attention to how corridors evolve. Neighborly's success or failure on San Vicente is going to be read by every next tenant looking at the block. Off the 405's absence in 2027 will pull the Saturday-night gravity elsewhere for two years, which changes the rhythm of dinner reservations at Toscana, Baltaire, and the Barrington restaurants that used to anchor the pre-concert timeslot. And the Country Mart is quietly proving that programming a shopping center like a village square is still the more resilient model.
Take advantage of the compression. It is a real one, and it will not look the same in 2027.
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