Saturday's ribbon-cutting at Palisades Village came with a flyover, an evening concert bill that included David Foster and Katharine McPhee, and speeches from Anthony Hopkins and Kate Hudson. Crowds spilled out of the Elyse Walker boutique and into the street. It was the kind of day photographers wait for.
Four days later, on Wednesday, August 19, a much quieter reopening happens on the same block, and it tells you more about how this neighborhood actually recovers than Saturday's spectacle did. The Pacific Palisades Farmers Market returns to Swarthmore Avenue that afternoon, and it is not coming back the way it left. For nineteen months, residents have been picturing the market as it was: Sunday mornings, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., stalls running down both Swarthmore and Antioch. What actually returns this week is Wednesdays, 1:30 to 5:30 p.m., one street only. That is not a rounding error. It is a decision, and understanding why it was made tells you more about the shape of this recovery than the ribbon-cutting does.
A Grand Reopening That Isn't Actually Finished
Palisades Village is 99 percent leased, which sounds like a finished sentence. It isn't. Only about 70 percent of businesses opened their doors on Saturday. The rest phase in over the coming months, which means the version of the Village you walked through this weekend is not the final one. Treat the next few visits as previews, not verdicts.
The tenant mix itself has shifted more than most coverage let on. Jackie Levy, Caruso's chief financial and revenue officer, put a number on it: nearly one-third of the Village's businesses are new, a figure she described as the product of a deliberate leasing strategy rather than simple attrition. Some longtime names chose not to come back at all. Aerin, Aesop, Lululemon and Saint Laurent all elected not to return. In their place: Nancy Silverton's Spacca Tutto, her first restaurant on the Westside, and Timothy Hollingsworth's Alphabet Bar & Grill, a name that nods directly to the Alphabet Streets a few blocks up. Violet Grey, Xirena and LESET, the last making its first West Coast appearance anywhere, round out the new arrivals.
Meanwhile, some of the businesses you'd call "returning" aren't returning unchanged either. Blue Ribbon Sushi used its rebuild to expand its patio and add an omakase bar it didn't have before. Buck Mason is coming back with a café concept bolted onto its usual footprint. K Bakery's Kim Kedeshian reopened on a smaller scale than before the fire, focused on a tighter menu that includes her chicken pot pies. Elyse Walker made the biggest structural move of anyone: after operating her flagship across the street for more than 25 years, she relocated the store inside Palisades Village itself, alongside Towne, her existing shop for closet essentials.
Two names are conspicuously absent from the celebration. The Bay Theater, the Village's Netflix-operated cinema, is listed as "reopening August 2026" on its own site, but as of the week of the grand opening it had not posted a specific date, and coverage from the days before the ribbon-cutting still showed it being readied rather than running. Erewhon, the specialty grocer that anchored the property before the fire, isn't expected back until January 2027. If your mental map of the Village includes a movie before dinner or a grocery run on the way home, that map is still a few months out of date.
The Farmers Market's Quiet Reversal
The schedule change at the farmers market is the most interesting decision in this entire reopening, and it had almost nothing to do with nostalgia.
Melissa Farwell, director of development for Raw Inspiration, the nonprofit that has run the market on Swarthmore since 2000, told the Palisadian-Post that organizers spent months searching for a workable footprint before landing on Wednesday afternoons. The old Sunday slot wasn't ruled out for sentimental reasons. It was ruled out because many of the market's own vendors had spent the last year and a half building business at other Sunday markets around the region, and pulling them away from those commitments on short notice risked costing them income they now depend on. "Sundays are really packed and busy days for a lot of vendors," Farwell said. Wednesday was the schedule that didn't force anyone to choose.
Farwell was careful to call the change temporary rather than final. Organizers want to bring the Sunday market back eventually, but they are treating this first Wednesday as a test, watching turnout before committing to anything permanent. Maryam Zar, CEO of the PaliBu Chamber of Commerce, and Caruso himself are both credited with helping broker the market's return to a footprint that had been unavailable to it while the Village sat closed.
If you've been waiting for "your" farmers market to come back so you can slot it back into a Sunday routine, it isn't there yet, and the people running it aren't promising it will be.
Planning Around the Version That Actually Exists
The useful move right now isn't waiting for the pre-fire routine to reassemble itself. It's building a new one around what's actually scheduled.
| Day | Time | What's happening |
|---|---|---|
| Mondays | 10 a.m. to noon | Mahjong Social at Palisades Village |
| First Tuesday of the month | 6 to 7:30 p.m. | Rummikub Social |
| Wednesdays | 1:30 to 5:30 p.m. | Pacific Palisades Farmers Market, Swarthmore Ave |
| Fourth Sunday of the month | 8 a.m. | Cars & Coffee |
Parking is free at Palisades Village through September 2026, a window worth using while it lasts. The city's Board of Public Works has also unanimously approved a Streetscape and Beautification Project for the surrounding commercial district, covering sidewalk repairs, tree replanting, landscaping and lighting, so expect the blocks around the Village to keep changing shape even after the shops themselves settle in.
The Pattern Underneath the Ribbon-Cutting
None of this is really about a shopping center. It's about how a place comes back after something like this, and the honest answer is: unevenly, on a schedule set by the people actually running the businesses, not by the calendar residents remember. The same logic shows up in the residential rebuild just beyond the Village gates. As of August 12, 2026, the Pacific Palisades rebuild had reached 1,000 homes under construction, with 35 issued certificates of occupancy as of the following day. That is real momentum and also a small fraction of what burned. Both numbers are true at once, the same way the Village is both open and not finished.
Steven James Design & Development works throughout Pacific Palisades and the surrounding Westside, and we've watched this pattern repeat across homes, blocks and now a town center: recovery here happens in stages that reward patience over assumption. If you're weighing a rebuild, a remodel or a move in this neighborhood and want a read on where things actually stand rather than where the headlines say they stand, schedule a consultation to talk it through.
