The New Restaurant On Ventura Boulevard Isn't The Oldest Thing Open This Weekend

Here's a question worth sitting with if you live anywhere near the Balboa and Ventura intersection: what's actually been running longer, the restaurant that opened five months ago, or the water source that's been flowing on the same spot since before Los Angeles had freeways, before California was a state, before Ventura Boulevard was a boulevard at all?

The restaurant is Popular, the seventh concept from Tel Aviv Restaurant Group, and it's worth your attention. But the honest answer to the question above is a five-acre park you've probably driven past a hundred times without noticing the gate. This weekend, and most weekends in Encino, the newest thing on the boulevard is competing for your time against things that have been reliably showing up for decades, in one case for close to two centuries. That contrast is the actual shape of an Encino weekend right now, and it's worth understanding both halves of it.

A Restaurant Seven Concepts Deep

Popular landed at 18047 Ventura Blvd in March, and it's the kind of opening that gets talked about at pickup lines and dog parks. Tel Aviv Restaurant Group built it as its seventh concept, a 4,000-square-foot space with a dining room, an eight-seat bar, and a patio, led by executive chef Dor Priezler. The menu leans Mediterranean fusion with a seafood-forward bent, and the dish people mention first is the Fish Cigar, a crispy pastry filled with fresh branzino, herbs, chili, and lemon zest, served with sumac yogurt and olive oil. There's also a baklava built with savory cheeses instead of the usual sweet filling, which tells you the kitchen isn't just running a standard Mediterranean playbook.

Popular keeps a kosher kitchen, which explains a quirk in its schedule: the doors close through Friday and the week's dining service picks back up Saturday night once Shabbat ends. If you've wondered why the place seems to keep different hours than everything else on that stretch, that's why.

It's a genuinely good addition to the boulevard. It is also, in the context of an actual Encino weekend, the least permanent thing on this list. Restaurants open, get discovered, get written up, and eventually get replaced by the next concept in someone else's rotation. The rest of what fills an Encino Saturday and Sunday doesn't work that way.

The Adobe That's Older Than The Boulevard

A block off Ventura, on Moorpark Street, sits Los Encinos State Historic Park, and the way you get in tells you something about how overlooked it is: there's no parking lot. You park on the street and enter through the gate. That's it. No signage competing for attention on the boulevard, no valet, nothing that announces itself the way a new restaurant does.

What's actually inside is a working record of who's occupied this exact patch of the San Fernando Valley going back thousands of years, long before it had that name. The site was the village of Siutcanga, home to Chumash, Tongva, and Tataviam people who were later grouped together and called "Fernandeños" following the founding of the San Fernando Mission. A natural spring on the property, the same one that made this one of the first inhabited spots in the Valley, still feeds a reservoir shaped like a Spanish guitar, built in 1874 by rancher Eugene Garnier. The original adobe on the grounds dates to 1849. The two-story stone Garnier building sits nearby.

Rangers keep coin-operated feed machines at the pond, 25 cents a scoop, specifically so visitors don't feed the resident ducks bread, which the birds can't properly digest. It's a small detail, but it's the kind of thing that tells you this park gets steady, ordinary foot traffic from families who already know the rules, not just tourists passing through once.

One visitor's review of the park put it simply:

"The buildings are in wonderful shape and the state deserves kudos for keeping this area open."

The park runs two free public programs worth putting on your calendar. Heritage Days happen the third Sunday of nearly every month from 1 to 3 p.m., and the next one lands September 20, followed by October 18, November 22, and December 20. Separately, the park runs guided History Walking Tours on Fridays, tracing how the natural spring, the site's Indigenous history, and its shift from Mexican to American ownership during the Gold Rush era shaped what Encino eventually became. Tour scheduling can shift by season, so a quick call to the park before you go is worth it.

Who Actually Funds Your Sunday Morning

Speaking of that farmers market: it's worth knowing who's actually behind it, because it isn't a private promoter running a commercial event. The ONEgeneration Encino Farmers Market is operated by ONEgeneration, the nonprofit that runs intergenerational senior day programs and childcare in the same part of the Valley, and the market's proceeds go directly toward funding those programs. So the eggs, the grass-fed bison and beef, the fresh flowers, and the honey you're buying on a Sunday morning are also, in a very direct way, paying for elder care services down the street.

The market runs rain or shine, every Sunday, year-round, with more than 30 farmers represented, including a certified organic contingent and a fresh fishmonger. Regular vendors like Fresco Pasta and Walters Cookies have built enough of a following that people show up specifically for them. It's a small operational detail that changes how the market reads: less a weekend errand, more a standing civic transaction that happens to also get you groceries.

The Ridge Line Behind The Boulevard

The other half of an Encino weekend happens above the boulevard, not on it. At the end of Mulholland Drive, where it meets Encino Hills Drive, sits San Vicente Mountain Park, a former Nike missile control site (designated LA96C) from the Cold War era, now repurposed as a public overlook. From there, an 8.5-mile stretch of Mulholland Drive on the Valley side is closed to vehicle traffic entirely, leaving it to hikers, runners, and cyclists on what's effectively a long fire road with sweeping views back down into the Valley.

That trail connects into Westridge-Canyonback Wilderness Park, part of a roughly 20,000-acre contiguous open space locals call the "Big Wild," which stretches from the Encino side all the way to Westridge Road in West LA. For a longer loop, Caballero Canyon Trail picks up nearby off Reseda Boulevard, a 3.3 to 3.4-mile round trip with about 625 feet of elevation gain that climbs into the canyon before connecting back toward the same ridge system. None of this requires a car once you're up there, and none of it requires cell service, reservations, or a wait for a table. Early morning or the last hour before sunset are the times locals actually use it, since there's minimal shade along most of the ridge.

What This Actually Adds Up To

None of this is an argument against Popular, or against whatever opens next on Ventura Boulevard after it. New restaurants are part of what makes a neighborhood feel alive from month to month, and Encino has earned a reputation for a strong dining strip precisely because it keeps adding things like this. But the actual weekend structure underneath all of it, the free history program at a 177-year-old adobe, the nonprofit farmers market funding elder care two miles away, the closed-to-cars ridge line that's been open to walkers for decades, doesn't turn over the way a menu does. It's already there, it's free or nearly free, and most of it requires nothing more than showing up.

If you're weighing what it actually means to live in a place like this, long-term, that distinction between what changes and what doesn't tends to matter more than any single opening ever does. If you're curious how Encino's market has been holding up, or you're thinking about what a move here or away from here would actually look like, Team Amalia-K has been working this stretch of the Valley long enough to walk you through it plainly. Get an instant home valuation or reach out directly when you're ready to talk specifics.