Walk south on Hillhurst on a Tuesday around six and the sidewalk tells you what has changed. There is a line outside a corner storefront where Thai on Hillhurst used to sit. Two doors down, another line spills out of a room that was Nossa Caipirinha until the end of 2024. Cross Franklin at Harvard and the paint on the crosswalk is still bright. None of this is a reinvention. Los Feliz Village has been doing the same trick for a hundred years, which is to add new things to old rooms without pulling the block apart.
That is the thesis for anyone who already lives here and is trying to make sense of the last twelve months: the Village is not turning into somewhere else. It is doing what it always does, which is refill the same storefronts with a slightly different generation of tenants while the civic edges get patched up around them. The buildings that housed a pharmacy or a five-and-dime a century ago now hold a wine bar or a bookstore, and the scale never changed.
The Hillhurst Swap List
The two rooms getting the most foot traffic right now both opened in the last stretch of 2025, and both moved into spaces that had been quietly familiar for years.
Address | Former Tenant | Now |
|---|---|---|
1850 Hillhurst Ave | Thai on Hillhurst | Wilde's |
Hillhurst near Prospect | Nossa Caipirinha Bar | Vandell |
Wilde's opened on October 30, 2025, from childhood friends Natasha Price and Tatiana Ettensberger. Price runs the kitchen with a British inflection drawn from her family in London, and Ettensberger built the natural wine list after a stint managing Cafe Triste in Chinatown. The chef de cuisine is Sarah Durning, whose background bridges butchery and pastry, which is a useful combination when the room is turning out fish and chips, a bar burger, meat pies, and an Eton Mess in the same service. Reservations open two weeks in advance at 10 a.m. About half the dining room stays held for walk-ins, and if you show up at 5 p.m. on a weekday you can usually get seated at the 5:30 opening. Weekends run closer to a two hour wait. The café hours are Thursday through Sunday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., and the breakfast sandwich, with brown sauce and a runny egg on focaccia-like bread, is arguably the easier way to try the kitchen without waiting.
Vandell opened in early December 2025 in the same space that Nossa Caipirinha vacated at the end of 2024. It is a proper cocktail bar, from Michael Francesconi and Matthew Glaser of Park Hospitality, the group behind Donna's in Echo Park and Lowboy. The drinks program is run by Vay Su and Shawn Lickliter, both Republique alums. The food menu is deliberately short, about a dozen shareable plates including a crudo and a bar burger, and the operational choice is the one worth flagging for anyone who lives within walking distance: Vandell is largely walk-in. A few Resys open up, but the rest of the room is held, and the door team keeps a waitlist that assumes you will wander off and come back. That is a design decision, not an oversight, and it is why the sidewalk out front has turned into its own scene.
The pattern is worth naming. Two Hillhurst tenants who had been part of the block for years closed. Two operators who explicitly chose Los Feliz for its walkability and neighborhood scale moved into the same rooms without gutting them. "We had all been talking about Los Feliz being our top choice, so it felt like kismet," Glaser told Resy in February. The rooms turned over. The block did not.
The Adobe Gets a Second Century
If you have hiked out of Fern Dell in the last year you probably noticed the Griffith Park Visitor Center was dark. It has been closed for renovation since fall 2025 and reopened in December with a ribbon cutting hosted by the parks department and the Friends of Griffith Park. The building itself is the Rancho Los Feliz Adobe, which dates to the 1830s and predates almost everything else on the block by a hundred years.
The renovation came in under $200,000, funded by the Griffith J. Griffith Charitable Trust and Council District 4. What actually got done:
- Two new large interactive displays, one on park flora and fauna, one on park history
- The three dimensional park map that everyone photographs was kept and updated
- New taxidermy of park wildlife plus repair of the older mounts, all executed by Lincoln Heights firms RabCup and Prey Taxidermy
- A new shade structure and game tables out front, so people can check out board games and stay in the plaza
Gerry Hans, president of the Friends of Griffith Park, described the long term vision as converting the Adobe from office space into a full welcome center and museum. What that means for a resident is small but real: the closest useful stop for updated trail maps, current closure notices, and wildlife advisories is open again, and it is now a place you can actually linger at rather than duck into.
Small Civic Marks
None of the following would be a headline on its own. Together they are the reason the Village still reads as a neighborhood people are maintaining rather than one that is coasting.
- A new crosswalk at Harvard and Franklin. Installed in late October 2025, worked on by the Los Feliz Neighborhood Council with committee members and community partners. It is a small intersection that had needed one for a long time.
- Rainbow steps at Founders Metropolitan Community Church on Prospect Avenue. Unveiled at a Sunday event as part of a series leading up to the 50th anniversary of the rainbow flag in 2028. Founders MCC has been on Prospect for decades. The paint job is the visible piece of a longer commemorative arc.
- Skylight Books is expanding to Eagle Rock. The Vermont Avenue store is not going anywhere. The expansion is a second location, and it is a useful signal that the flagship is healthy enough to grow.
- The Vista Theatre continues to run film only. Quentin Tarantino bought the 1923 movie palace in 2021 and reopened it on November 17, 2023, running only celluloid, never digital, on one of a handful of VistaVision projectors left in the world. Nothing changed in the last year. It is on this list because two years in, the format has held, and the Vista is now a fixed piece of the Village's southern gate rather than a project.
What's Coming to the South Gate
The change that will actually reshape the walk from Prospect down toward Hollywood Boulevard is the grocery-anchored building rising on the old car-wash lot at the Village's southern edge. It is under construction now. There is no need to speculate about how it will land. The block has absorbed a movie palace, a jazz bar, a duplex row, and a run of streetcar-era shopfronts already, and the grocer will slot into that same low, human-scaled rhythm or it will feel wrong. The Village will make that judgment quickly. It always does.
The point of tracking all of this on one page is not that Los Feliz is having a moment. It is that the moment looks a lot like the last one and the one before that. New operators keep choosing this specific stretch of Hillhurst and Vermont because it is walkable, because the storefronts are the right size, and because the neighbors are the kind of people who will show up on a Tuesday. Wilde's and Vandell both said as much on the record. The Adobe reopening said it in a different key. The crosswalk and the rainbow steps say it in the smallest voice available.
If you already live here, none of this is news exactly. It is a receipt.
If you own a home in Los Feliz and are thinking about the next move, whether that is a sale, a purchase in one of the Village's tighter pockets, or a question about how a specific block is trading right now, I am glad to talk through it. Justin Mitchell works with buyers and sellers across the Eastside from the Compass office on Sunset. Let's Connect.
