Drive past Van Nuys Boulevard and Hesby Street this month and you will find a drive-thru line that did not exist eight months ago, wrapped around a building that has stood on that corner since 1958. For six years the swooping roofline over that lot belonged to nothing. The restaurant inside had closed, the windows were boarded, and one of the last true Googie coffee shops in Los Angeles sat as a shell of stone and rusted steel. Last December it reopened, restored down to the reassembled rock wall and the hand-bent neon, as a Chick-fil-A.
That restoration is the quietest business story on a boulevard that is otherwise loud with new leases this year. Five separate food, drink and entertainment concepts are landing within easy walking distance of each other on Ventura Boulevard, none relocating from far away, all betting that the stretch most of us treat as an errand route can also be a destination. The restaurants get the attention. The building explains why the rest of it makes sense.
Five New Addresses on One Stretch of Ventura
Yama Sushi Marketplace, the grab-and-go sushi market that has operated since 1984 out of West Los Angeles, Koreatown and San Gabriel, is taking a roughly 7,200 square foot space at 15300 Ventura Blvd, its largest build to date and its first stop in the Valley. CEO Scott Kohno has called Ventura Boulevard "ground zero for sushi in Los Angeles," and the new location is expected to add a full bar alongside the sake and bento cases the chain is known for. The opening is targeted for late summer 2026.
A few blocks away, Burger She Wrote opened this spring at 14245 Ventura Blvd, its first expansion beyond the original Beverly Boulevard storefront it built its following on. The concept was founded in 2021 by professional skateboarder Don "Nuge" Nguyen and the late restaurateur Steven Arroyo, whose prior projects included Church & State and Escuela Taqueria. The menu centers on Oklahoma-style smash burgers made with Wagyu beef from Snake River Farms on King's Hawaiian buns, a nod to Nguyen's hometown. Sherman Oaks and a coming Brentwood location mark the brand's first moves outside its original address, not a tenth outpost in a chain that has already proven itself elsewhere.
At 14350 Ventura, Aromas Indian Cuisine has opened in the space that formerly housed Billa Indian Cuisine and SanSai Japanese Grill. The restaurant is led by Jaspal Singh, who draws on family recipes for North Indian dishes, and Jaspreet Bindra, a chef and food critic whose travels through India inform the broader menu. Expect Chicken Tikka Masala and Biryani alongside street food staples like Papri Chaat and Pani Puri. Down the block, a Mexico-based bakery brand, La Era, is bringing its Gloria concept to 13944 Ventura Blvd this summer, moving into the space that Gracefully Fed vacated last October.
Two Golf Simulators, Doors Apart
The most curious overlap on the boulevard right now is not a restaurant at all. Two indoor golf concepts are operating within walking distance of each other, and they are not the same bet.
| The City Golf | Hapa Haus | |
|---|---|---|
| Address | 15250 Ventura Blvd | 15301 W. Ventura Blvd, Sherman Oaks Galleria |
| Format | Practice bays with Foresight GCQuad tracking | Dinner-and-golf, five simulators |
| Seating | Bay-based, no kitchen | 69 indoor seats, 48 on a 1,526 sq ft covered patio |
| Menu | None | Hawaiian-leaning food and full bar |
| Status | Open | Targeting November 2026 |
The City Golf reads as a straightforward practice facility built around simulator technology. Hapa Haus, from owner Alex Miyawaki, who picked up the sport during the pandemic, is something closer to a restaurant that happens to have clubs in the corner, according to city planning filings for the Galleria space. Two operators looking at the same stretch of boulevard and arriving at different products for the same evening habit says something about how much room the corridor's operators think exists for after-work and weekend leisure spending that used to mean a drive over the hill.
The Building That Explains the Rest of It
The restoration at Van Nuys and Hesby is worth more attention than a reopening usually gets, because of who did the work and why the building was still standing at all.
The structure was built in 1958 as Stanley Burke's coffee shop, designed by Helen Liu Fong of the firm Armet & Davis, the architects behind the Googie style's defining Los Angeles landmarks including Pann's, Norms and Johnie's. The building later operated for decades as Corky's, an all-night diner that served hot-rodders and after-church breakfast crowds along what was once L.A.'s most famous cruising strip. After the restaurant closed, preservationists nominated the building and the city's Cultural Heritage Commission designated it Historic-Cultural Monument #1215 in 2020, protecting it from demolition.
Designation alone does not rebuild a roofline. That work fell to architectural historian Alan Hess, who had nominated the building for landmark status years earlier, and designer Miranda Lee, who oversaw a reconstruction described by Architect Magazine as closer to an archaeological dig than a renovation. Crews dismantled and renumbered the original Palos Verdes stone wall stone by stone before reassembling it, rebuilt the signature dogleg steel beams, and had the neon sign hand-bent to match the original rather than swapped for LED. The zig-zag banquette seating was recreated from archived plans. Lee, herself a Chinese American designer, called restoring the work of Fong, a pioneering Chinese American architect largely absent from design history until now, "a full-circle moment."
None of that explains why the building survived long enough to be saved. That answer sits with the Fuller family. Homer J. Fuller built the restaurant in 1958, and the property has remained in his family's hands ever since. When Corky's lost its lease, it was Fuller's descendants who went looking for a tenant willing to restore the original architecture rather than clear the lot for something cheaper to build, according to Los Angeles Magazine. They found it in a fast food chain, of all tenants, willing to spend more than five years and real money on stone and neon instead of stucco and LED.
That is the pattern worth sitting with. The boulevard's newest storefronts are arriving because operators from outside the neighborhood are betting on it for the first time. Its oldest structure is still standing because one family never let go of it in the first place.
What Hasn't Moved
Amid all this turnover, the parts of Sherman Oaks that draw a crowd every single week have not changed shape at all. The Sherman Oaks Farmers Market still runs Tuesdays from 2 to 6 p.m. in the Westfield Fashion Square parking lot at 14006 Riverside Drive, a short block off Ventura, produce stand next to produce stand the way it has for years.
The Sherman Oaks Street Fair is confirmed for its 34th year on Sunday, October 18, 2026, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., closing Ventura Boulevard between Kester Avenue and Van Nuys Boulevard for the day. Burger She Wrote and Aromas are already serving from that stretch, and by fair day Yama Sushi should be too, putting three of the boulevard's newest kitchens within a short walk of the fair's footprint.
The contrast is the point. A boulevard can add five new concepts and a second golf-simulator bar in a single year and still be the same neighborhood, because the market that closes the street every October and the produce stand that shows up every Tuesday were never the part that was supposed to change.
That mix of fast-moving storefronts and slow-moving institutions is what makes a place like Sherman Oaks worth paying attention to, whether you are grabbing dinner on the walk from the new sushi counter to the old diner turned chicken restaurant, or just trying to figure out where to park on fair day.
If you live on or near this stretch of Ventura and ever want to talk about what any of this means for your own corner of the neighborhood, Martin Avalos is based right here in Sherman Oaks and keeps closer track of this boulevard than most. Schedule a free consultation and instant home valuation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
