The marquee at 11502 Ventura Boulevard came back on this year. For most of the past five years it stayed dark, a landmark building with nowhere to go and no one who could quite make it work. Its return says more about what is actually happening on this boulevard than any list of new openings could on its own.
Studio City is in the middle of a genuine restaurant and bar boom. More than a dozen new places have opened along Ventura Boulevard in 2026, and if you only count the newcomers you would think this is a story about growth. It is really a story about reuse. Almost every address in this wave was already something else, and the building at 11502 is the clearest proof of it.
A landmark that took five years to reopen
That address belonged to Oil Can Harry's, a country-western bar that opened in 1968 and became one of the longest-running LGBTQ+ venues in the country. The space had history before that too. It started as a burlesque club decades earlier, and in the years when same-sex couples dancing together was against the law in Los Angeles, the bar kept a hidden alarm system that let patrons switch partners the moment police walked in.
The bar closed for good in January 2021 after 52 years, when the building's owner sold the property to a buyer who wanted to open something new. It could have gone in almost any direction after that. Instead, in April 2022, the Los Angeles City Council voted 14 to 0 to designate the building a Historic-Cultural Monument, only the third LGBTQ+ structure in the city to receive that status. As Councilman Paul Krekorian put it at the time, when the bar opened in 1968, "it was illegal in Los Angeles for two men or two women to dance together."
The landmark designation protected the building's shell, but it did not guarantee anyone could make a business inside it succeed. A jazz venue was floated when the sale first happened. A room called The Write-Off Room eventually opened and tried its own format, then closed by January 2025. For most of the five years between the bar's closure and this year, the building sat there, protected but empty, waiting for a concept that fit.
What finally worked
This year it found one. The Starlight Cabaret is now open in the old Oil Can Harry's building, co-owned by comedian Katie Cazorla and music producer Walter Afanasieff, whose production credits include some of the biggest pop recordings of the 1990s. The main room keeps an Old Hollywood art deco feel and runs comedy and variety shows, live band country line dancing, and burlesque and magic acts. Upstairs, a speakeasy-style tiki bar hosts weekend karaoke.
The format is different from the country-western dance floor that came before it, but the bones of the idea are the same: a room built for live entertainment, in a building that was always built for exactly that. It took five years and two failed attempts to find the operator who understood the assignment.
The rest of the boulevard is following the same pattern
Once you notice the reuse pattern at Oil Can Harry's, it shows up everywhere else on the boulevard this year. Highly Likely, a new all-day spot serving Japanese breakfast bowls in the morning and steak frites with natural wine at night, opened in the space longtime locals still think of as Lemonade. A few blocks away, the taqueria El Ruso moved into the former home of Roadside Taco, upgrading from a street cart and truck to its first brick-and-mortar location while keeping the fresh Sonoran flour tortillas that built its following.
A few of this year's other arrivals worth knowing if you have not been out lately:
- Alto Fire to Table, an open-flame Argentine kitchen where the cooking happens in view of the dining room
- Rosetta Osteria & Crudo Bar, a coastal Italian concept built around raw preparations
- Great White, the California coastal cafe with locations in West Hollywood, Larchmont, and Venice, now on Ventura Place
- Cafe Matcha and Junior Cookies, both specialty daytime spots that extend the boulevard's coffee and dessert options
Almost none of this required new construction. It required someone deciding an existing room could hold a different idea.
Ventura Place does double duty
Great White's new location matters for another reason. It sits on Ventura Place, the short connector street that has hosted the Studio City Farmers Market every Sunday for years. The market runs from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., rain or shine, on the same stretch between Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Radford Avenue, drawing more than 80 farmers, artisans, and food vendors on a given Sunday. It is a non-profit, run jointly by the Studio City Chamber of Commerce Foundation and the Studio City Residents Association, and parking is handled through the Radford Studios structure just past the studio gate, a detail only someone who has actually gone knows to look for.
For years, Ventura Place has been a Sunday-morning street. With an all-day cafe now anchored on the same block, it starts to hold its own on the other six days too. That is a small shift, but it is the kind of shift that changes how a block gets used, not just what gets sold on it.
Sushi Row didn't move over
None of this is displacing what already worked. Ventura Boulevard's Sushi Row remains anchored by Katsu-ya, open since 1997, the Michelin-starred Asanebo, and Teru Sushi, open since 1979. Those three didn't lose ground to the new wave. They gained neighbors. Pop Up Bagels is opening soon at 12184 Ventura Boulevard, with Omake set to open nearby at 12437, both addresses tucked within a few blocks of restaurants that have anchored this strip for decades.
The throughline across all of it: Studio City isn't trading its history for growth. It is filling in around it, one existing address at a time.
Worth seeing this month
If you want to take stock of the boulevard for yourself, a few ways to do it without much planning:
- Check the current schedule at The Starlight Cabaret before a Friday or Saturday night
- Start a Sunday at the Farmers Market on Ventura Place, then walk over to Great White for a second coffee
- Book a weeknight table at one of the Sushi Row originals, then compare it to what's new a few doors down
Studio City has always had a strong dining scene. What is different this year is how much of it is happening inside buildings the neighborhood already knew.
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