On a Sunday morning, the folding tables go up along the 9300 block of Civic Center Drive and Beverly Hills residents are working through dates, orchids and cut flowers before the market has been open an hour. A few blocks over on Beverly Drive, the counter at Nate 'n Al's is doing the same breakfast rush it has done since 1945, matzo ball soup and a Reuben, regulars who know the waitstaff by name.
That counter won't be at that address much longer.
The Beverly Hills Planning Commission approved a three-story redevelopment at 414 North Beverly Drive in June 2025, and the deli, open since 1945, is now looking for a new home while, one street over, a wave of restaurants with no history in this city at all are opening one after another and filling up on a Tuesday. The two facts sit next to each other and tell you something the restaurant roundups don't: Beverly Hills isn't just adding tables. It's trading its last homegrown institution for a run of imports, and the street where that trade is happening isn't Rodeo.
The Passport Stamps On Canon Drive
Rodeo Drive still gets the ribbon cuttings. Canon Drive is where residents are actually eating.
Look at what's opened there in the past year and a pattern shows up fast. Bad Roman, the theatrical Italian-American spot with the wild boar statues, is the debut West Coast restaurant from Quality Branded, the New York group behind Quality Meats, Quality Italian, and Don Angie. It took over the former Palm steakhouse space at 267 North Canon Drive. A few blocks south on Robertson, the Michelin-starred omakase concept Sushi Nakazawa, created in New York by Alessandro Borgognone and chef Daisuke Nakazawa, opened its first West Coast location in the former Cuvee space at 145 South Robertson, with a $190 classic menu and a $295 chef's counter.
Marea, the acclaimed New York restaurant, chose Beverly Hills for its first West Coast outpost. Pura Vida, the healthy café concept with a cult following, took the former Tocaya Organica space for its first West Coast location. All'Antico Vinaio, the famed Florence-based sandwich shop, opened on the same stretch. Levain Bakery brought its six-ounce cookies. Hi Bake opened its first U.S. location here. Inside the Waldorf Astoria at 9850 Wilshire, chef Edoardo Baldi replaced the Jean-Georges restaurant in February with a Tuscan-inspired steakhouse built around his family's sweet corn tortellini, and the rooftop above it, once Rooftop by JG, is now Gemma, a pan-Asian menu that swings from Hawaii to Singapore.
None of these names had a Beverly Hills address two years ago. All of them do now, and most of them landed within a five-minute walk of each other.
Rodeo Gets The Ribbon Cuttings, Canon Gets The Reservations
The retail wave happening at the same time makes the split even clearer. Rodeo Drive is where the architecture statements are going up: a three-story Cartier boutique, a 45,000-square-foot Louis Vuitton building designed by Frank Gehry, an expanded Bvlgari. Beverly Drive is filling in with flagship stores from L'Agence, Tory Burch, and Veronica Beard, a relocated Zadig & Voltaire, a remodeled Maje, and an athleisure push from G/FORE and Wilson, with H&M joining the block.
| Street | What's landed in 2025-2026 | Who it's really serving |
|---|---|---|
| Rodeo Drive | Cartier's new three-story flagship, the Gehry-designed Louis Vuitton building, an expanded Bvlgari | Visitors chasing the marquee names |
| Beverly Drive | New flagships from L'Agence, Tory Burch, Veronica Beard, plus a relocated Zadig & Voltaire and incoming H&M | Shoppers, tourists and residents running errands |
| Canon Drive | Marea, Bad Roman, Sushi Nakazawa, Azur, Levain Bakery | Residents building a weekly dinner rotation |
The retail investment is aimed at people who fly in for it. The restaurant investment on Canon is aimed at people who live four blocks away and want a reservation on a Thursday. That's the distinction the citywide press releases don't make, because it isn't their job to. It's the one that actually matters if you're deciding where to eat this week.
The Deli Running Out The Clock
Here's the part of the story that doesn't fit the growth narrative. While Canon fills in with first-time addresses, Beverly Drive is quietly losing its oldest one.
Nate 'n Al's opened in 1945 at 414 North Beverly Drive, founded by Nate Rimer and Al Mendelson with room for thirty people. It became the kind of place where industry deals got made over lox and eggs, where Larry King was a regular for more than four decades. Shelli and Irving Azoff bought it in 2019 to keep it from closing, and it survived a pandemic shutdown intact. What it hasn't survived is the building.
The Planning Commission's June 10, 2025 approval clears the way for a three-story commercial structure on the site, and building owner Stephen Cloobeck has said publicly the deli's next home will sit one block south, at the corner of Beverly Drive and Dayton Way. Shelli Azoff has been consistent that the restaurant isn't closing, but she hasn't confirmed that address. At the June hearing, one commissioner acknowledged being sad to see the original building go while calling the redevelopment "good progress for our city and for the area."
There's a quieter irony buried in the timing. For more than a decade, Nate 'n Al's has judged the Beverly Hills Farmers' Market's PickleFest contest, the annual Best Dill Pickle competition that shows up on those same folding tables every August. This year, the deli handing out that prize is also running out the lease on the only address it's ever had.
The Week That Doesn't Need A Car
Set the restaurant math aside for a second and the actual rhythm of a Beverly Hills week is simpler than the headlines suggest, and it doesn't touch Rodeo at all.
This summer's Concerts on Cañon series wrapped for the year on August 20 with a set from The Tokens, closing out a Thursday-night lineup at Beverly Cañon Gardens that ran from Susie Hansen's Latin Band through Tom Nolan Band, Joyce Partise, Woodie and the Longboards, Groovis Maximus, and The Brat Pack. It's free, it's outdoors at 241 North Cañon Drive, and it sits across the street from most of the restaurants listed above, which is exactly the point: residents who showed up at 6 p.m. for a concert had dinner reservations within a hundred feet of the lawn.
That series won't return until next June. What doesn't stop is the market. The Beverly Hills Farmers' Market runs every Sunday, rain or shine, from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. along Civic Center Drive, with free two-hour parking in the Civic Center garage. It's the one fixed point on the calendar that hasn't moved while everything around it, Canon's restaurant roster, Beverly Drive's storefronts, has turned over at a pace the city hasn't seen in years.
A resident's week, stripped down: Sunday morning at the market for produce and flowers. A Canon Drive dinner sometime in the week at whichever new kitchen has a table open, which changes month to month. A stop at Nate 'n Al's for the counter and the booths while the address still says 414 North Beverly.
What This Actually Says About The Neighborhood
The easy read on Beverly Hills right now is growth: more restaurants, more flagship stores, more attention ahead of a year the city itself has called a milestone. The truer read is a trade. The Golden Triangle is filling in fast with places that have never been here before, and the one institution old enough to remember what the streets looked like fifty years ago is the one being asked to move.
Both things are true at once, and neither cancels the other out. That's what a neighborhood actually paying attention looks like from the inside, not a list of openings, but a sense of what's arriving against what's leaving, block by block.
If a home in this part of Beverly Hills, or the market conditions shaping it, are on your mind for reasons beyond dinner reservations, Marc Robinson has spent two decades reading these blocks. Schedule a confidential consultation when you're ready to talk specifics.
