The stretch of Ventura Boulevard between Balboa and Sepulveda has always been the address people mean when they say "Encino." It is where you park, where you meet, where the sushi counters and the steakhouses and the family Italian rooms have kept their tables set for decades. That has not changed. What has changed, quietly, over the past several months, is that the boulevard is no longer the only center of gravity in the neighborhood. A cluster of summer 2026 openings, a Sunday routine that keeps getting more crowded, and a piece of federal recreation news you may have missed are all pulling attention a few blocks north, toward the 2,000 acres of open space that Encino has always half-forgotten it owns.
The read on this summer is not that Encino got new restaurants. It is that Encino's usable geography just grew.
The boulevard is still busy, but the newest energy is daytime and design-forward
The most talked-about arrival is Popular, the seventh concept from the Tel Aviv Restaurant Group, offering Mediterranean fusion cuisine, elevated seafood dishes, and crafted cocktails at 18047 Ventura Blvd. It is a real building event for the boulevard: a 4,000-square-foot space with a bright, modern design, a spacious dining room, a bar with seating for eight, and a patio for outdoor dining. Executive Chef Dor Priezler leads a menu that is seafood-forward, which is worth flagging because it slots into a stretch of the boulevard that has historically been defined by sushi rows and old-guard steakhouses rather than contemporary Mediterranean.
A few blocks over, Pialon is running as a Mediterranean tapas restaurant and bar with a shared-dining format on Ventura Blvd where every dish is $18 or under, open daily 5pm to 11pm. The under-$18 ceiling is the interesting number. On a boulevard where a proper dinner easily runs three figures per person, a room built around small plates at a fixed low price point is a different proposition, and it explains why the outdoor courtyard has been full on weeknights.
For the daytime half of the boulevard, Laidrey Coffee Roasters has been building the kind of neighborhood cafe most residents were quietly asking for. The Encino shop carries freshly baked pastries and breads from local bakery Bakers Kneaded, gluten free and vegan pastry selections, freshly baked Pop-Tarts, stuffed breakfast burritos, and open faced sweet and savory toasts, with oatmeal flavored with product from woman-owned Mylk Labs. That is a working local supply chain, not a franchise menu, and it is why the room feels different than the chains a mile east.
None of this displaces the anchors. Petit Trois Le Valley is still doing what a Ludo Lefebvre room does, with a 2015 James Beard nomination for Best New Restaurant and a Bib Gourmand designation when the Michelin Guide returned to Los Angeles in 2019. Mora Italiano is still turning out wood-fired pizzas and pastas at the eastern edge. Larsen's is still Larsen's. The Benihana at 16226 Ventura Blvd remains one of the more genuinely unusual dining rooms in the Valley for a reason most residents forget: the interior is an authentic Japanese farmhouse, dismantled and shipped from Japan, then reconstructed on-site right here in Encino. Bring an out-of-town guest there once and they never quite forget it.
What the newer rooms share is a daytime orientation, a lower price ceiling, and a design sensibility that reads more like the Westside than the old Valley. That is the boulevard's actual shift this year.
Sunday morning has a fixed address, and it isn't a restaurant
If you live in Encino and do not yet have a Sunday morning routine at the ONEgeneration Encino Farmers Market, you are missing the piece of the week most of your neighbors have quietly organized their weekends around. It runs every Sunday from 8:00 am to 1:00 pm, rain or shine, at 17400 Victory Boulevard between White Oak and Balboa.
The market is not a boutique pop-up. During the peak months between May and November, about 40 farms from all over central and Southern California participate, and about a third of the growers practice organic farming methods. The stalls stretch across proteins most farmers markets in Los Angeles cannot offer at scale: a farmer providing cuts of grass-fed bison, beef, pork and lamb, and a local fresh fish monger right across the aisle.
The economic structure is worth understanding, because it changes what a Sunday visit means. All farmers and vendors donate a portion of their sales at the end of the day, and every dollar spent shopping at the market helps to support seniors in the community. The proceeds support local farmers, small businesses, and ONEgeneration's programs, including homebound senior meals. You are buying produce and funding meal delivery for someone within a few miles of your house at the same time. That is a specifically Encino piece of civic architecture.
The basin is your second downtown, and most residents still under-use it
North of the boulevard, past the 101, sits the piece of Encino that most residents drive past ten times a week without walking into. The Sepulveda Basin Recreation Area covers roughly 2,000 acres and includes a wildlife reserve, the Sepulveda Dam, the Tillman Water Reclamation plant that treats 40 million gallons of water per day, Anthony C. Beilenson Park, Lake Balboa, and the Japanese Garden. It is the largest public open space in the San Fernando Valley.
Three specific uses are worth putting on your summer calendar.
The Lake Balboa loop is a 1.3-mile paved circuit that is the centerpiece of the park, and it plugs into a much larger network: a 9-mile bicycle path route looping around the recreation area, running from Victory Boulevard near I-405 westward to White Oak, south to Burbank, east to Woodley, and north back to Victory, with no steep or sustained hills and a maximum grade of no more than 2%. That grade profile is why the loop works for a nine-year-old and a training cyclist on the same morning. The lake itself is fed with reclaimed water from the Tillman plant, and the park is planted with many flowering cherry trees, Prunus serrulata 'Pink Cloud', which is what gives the shoreline its spring color.
The Wildlife Reserve is the slower option. The L.A. River Recreation Zone sits inside the Pacific Flyway, a major north-south flyway for migratory birds, and a huge variety of birds visit here to hunt for food and rest. The reserve itself is an ongoing habitat restoration project with locally native California plants, including Fremont's cottonwood, Coast live oak, Valley Oak, California Black Walnut, and California sycamore. Go at sunrise with binoculars and it does not feel like the Valley.
The river is the sleeper. Between roughly Balboa Boulevard and Woodley Avenue, any member of the public may launch a non-motorized, steerable boat such as a kayak or canoe, with swimming not permitted, and this portion of the river typically has Class I flows where the water is easy to paddle in. Fishing is legal along non-restricted banks with a California Department of Fish and Wildlife license, and species in the river include largemouth bass, tilapia, green sunfish, and mosquito fish. Most Encino residents have lived here for years without knowing they can put a kayak on the L.A. River fifteen minutes from their front door.
The 2028 announcement changes how to read all of it
Here is the piece that reframes the summer. During the 2028 Summer Olympics, the area around the Sepulveda Dam will host basketball (3x3), BMX racing and freestyle, modern pentathlon, and skateboarding. Four Olympic sports, in Encino's backyard, in two years.
That designation sits on top of a long-planned civic reshaping. The Sepulveda Basin Vision Plan, led by the Bureau of Engineering, was created to transform the 2,000-acre basin into a climate-resilient park that balances recreational, natural, and cultural spaces, and it is the first comprehensive plan by the City of Los Angeles for the basin. The framing worth carrying into the fall is honest: the basin is the largest public open space in the San Fernando Valley, but surrounding neighborhoods have only 0.2 acres of park per 1000 people in Van Nuys and Sherman Oaks, significantly below the LA County goal of 4 acres per 1000 people. The Olympics money and the Vision Plan money are both aimed at that gap.
One weekend, if you want a template
- Saturday morning. The 1.3-mile Lake Balboa loop at 7:00 am, before the heat, then coffee and a Bakers Kneaded pastry at Laidrey.
- Saturday night. Small plates and a courtyard cocktail at Pialon, or the seafood tasting at Popular if you want the newest room in the neighborhood.
- Sunday, 8:30 am. ONEgeneration Farmers Market at 17400 Victory. Bring cash for the vendors who do not take cards, buy fish from the monger, and take a bag of stone fruit home.
- Sunday afternoon. The Japanese Garden at Tillman, or a kayak on the river between Balboa and Burbank if you own the gear.
- Sunday dinner. Petit Trois Le Valley or the transplanted farmhouse at Benihana, depending on the age of the table.
That itinerary uses maybe six miles of road total. The point of writing it out is that the boulevard and the basin have never been closer together in how a resident actually spends a weekend, and the next two years are going to compress them further.
If you are thinking about how these shifts change what your own block looks like over the next few years, or you would like a neighborhood-level read on how Olympic infrastructure has historically moved values in adjacent enclaves, Ingrid Sacerio is available for a private consultation. Schedule a Private Consultation to talk it through over coffee on the boulevard.
