"We promised to come back better than before the fires, and we did."
— Rick Caruso, quoted in Beverly Press
He made the remark in front of the shopping center his company has spent the better part of nineteen months rebuilding. On Saturday, August 15, Palisades Village opens its doors again, with a ribbon-cutting at 10:30 a.m. and stores welcoming customers by 11. For a community that lost its commercial heart in the January 2025 fire, this is the day everyone has circled on a calendar.
But if you live here and you're picturing your old Sunday snapping back into place the way it was before the fire, the details tell a different story. The Village that reopens is not the Village that closed. Roughly a third of what you'll walk into on August 15 has never been there before, and one of the neighborhood's longest-running rituals is switching days entirely. Coming back and staying the same are two different things, and this reopening is mostly the first one.
The mechanics of the return
The day itself has been built as an event, not a soft reopening. After the 10:30 a.m. ribbon cutting, Palisades Village opens stores and restaurants at 11 a.m., followed by a full day of entertainment, retailer events, and family programming that runs through an 8 p.m. finale. Parking will be free through September 30, which matters if you've spent the last year and a half without a reason to circle the block looking for a spot on Swarthmore Avenue.
As of July, Caruso reported the center was 99 percent leased, with most pre-fire tenants returning. Caruso originally pledged $50 million toward the rebuild in 2025. By the time the reopening date was set, the company was describing the finished work as a $100 million restoration, which gives you a sense of how much scope grew between the initial commitment and the version of the Village you'll actually walk into.
Caruso's chief financial and revenue officer, Jackie Levy, put a number on the part that changes the character of the place: nearly one-third of the businesses opening on August 15 are new to the property.
Who's actually walking through the door
Two different lists are opening under the same roofline, and they tell two different stories.
Back where they left off:
- Loomey's Toys and K Bakery
- elysewalker
- A.L.C. and Veronica Beard
- Zimmermann and Brunello Cucinelli
- Blue Ribbon Sushi
- Erewhon, serving as the Village's specialty grocer
- Angelini Ristorante & Bar, with chef Gino Angelini choosing a quiet return out of respect for residents still rebuilding
New to Swarthmore Avenue:
- Spacca Tutto, an Italian steakhouse from Nancy Silverton
- LESET, opening its first West Coast location here
- Violet Grey and Xirena
PAIGE falls somewhere in between. The denim brand is reopening its Village store on August 15 as part of the returning group, and it's using the moment to raise money rather than just resume selling: a limited-edition Palisades Social Club shirt and sweatshirt will send 100 percent of proceeds to Steadfast LA, the wildfire recovery nonprofit covering Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and Altadena. PAIGE co-founder Paige Adams-Geller is a longtime Palisades resident herself, which is a detail that matters more here than it would almost anywhere else.
The practical read for anyone who lived by this shopping center before January 2025: your favorite bakery is probably still there, but the restaurant next to it might carry a name you've never seen on this street, and the quiet ones you'd expect to make noise, like Angelini, are choosing not to.
The habit that actually moves
The farmers market's schedule is one change that affects an actual weekly routine rather than just a shopping list.
The Pacific Palisades Farmers Market had been held on Sundays from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. before the fire closed it. When it comes back on Swarthmore Avenue, it's returning on Wednesdays instead, running 1:30 to 5:30 p.m., starting August 19, four days after the Village itself reopens. If Sunday morning was ever your ritual, the market that built it isn't going to be there anymore.
The rest of the Village's community calendar is coming back alongside it: the return of Kids Club activities, Mahjong and Rummikub socials, Cars & Coffee gatherings, and live weekend entertainment. Those pieces are largely unchanged. The market is the one thing on the list that's genuinely rearranging when it happens, and it's worth adjusting your week for now rather than discovering it the first Sunday you show up to an empty street.
What was already back, quietly
Palisades Village wasn't the first sign of commercial life in the neighborhood, and it's useful to know what's been running in the background while the bigger project was underway. CVS was the first major retailer to reopen, back in November 2025, and Chase Bank, Chipotle, and Anawalt Lumber followed, mostly serving construction crews and homeowners checking in on their properties during the day. The Palisades Garden Cafe has functioned as an informal meeting point through the rebuild.
Up in the Highlands, Spruzzo Palisades reopened back in 2025, well before Caruso ever set a date for the Village, and owner Ryan Gowhari has been running it as one of the few sit-down options in that part of the neighborhood ever since. If you've been driving up to the Highlands for a table this past year, that's why.
What one ribbon cutting doesn't cover
The scale here is worth sitting with. Cal Fire's count puts the total destruction at 6,822 structures, including more than 5,500 homes and about 100 commercial buildings. Palisades Village, with its roughly 40 storefronts, is a meaningful piece of that commercial core coming back online, but it is a fraction of it. The Ralphs that anchored the center of the neighborhood is still gone. The building burned, and while commercial space nearby is being leased for future tenants, there's no supermarket reopening alongside the Village on August 15.
Other parts of daily infrastructure are moving on their own timelines. The Palisades Recreation Center broke ground on a full rebuild in January 2026 and remains under construction. In the meantime, the Los Angeles Public Library's temporary Palisades branch has been operating out of the library parking lot at 861 Alma Real Drive since late January, open Tuesday through Saturday from 1 to 5 p.m., a scaled-down version of a service that used to run longer hours in a permanent building.
None of this is a criticism of the pace. It's context for anyone measuring August 15 against the neighborhood they remember. The Village reopening is a real milestone, and it's also one storefront cluster in a commercial district that's still mostly rebuilding around it.
What this actually means for your week
If you're back in the Palisades, whether in a repaired home or still finishing your own rebuild, the honest way to think about August 15 is less like a restoration and more like a reset. Some things return exactly as they were: the Bay Theater marquee, the walkable geometry of the Village, familiar faces behind familiar counters at places like elysewalker or Loomey's. Other things require you to build a new habit from scratch, starting with a Wednesday afternoon market instead of a Sunday morning one, and a dinner reservation system that now includes a Nancy Silverton steakhouse it never had before.
The neighborhood is coming back. It's just coming back as a version of itself that includes some new names, some quiet absences, and at least one calendar change worth writing down. For more on what's shifting across the Palisades as the rebuild continues, our Pacific Palisades neighborhood page tracks the pieces that matter to people living through it.
Whether you're settled back into your home, still weighing a rebuild, or thinking ahead to what ownership looks like here next, The Salazar | Bunnell Group has spent years reading this market up close. Partner With Our Expert Team when you're ready to talk through what the Palisades' recovery means for your own plans.
