"As soon as I walk into the RUNWAY, I just love that energy. I love the community."
That's Rashad Moumneh, the founder of Dizzy Bird, explaining why he chose Playa Vista for his third rotisserie chicken location after scouting sites across Los Angeles and Orange County. He's not a Playa Vista local. He's not sentimental about Millennium Drive. He runs a small chain that has so far stuck to suburban shopping centers, and he picked this particular stretch of pavement over every other option he looked at.
He's not the only outside operator who has made that call this year. Seabutter, the sushi group with locations in Beverly Hills, Glendale, Laguna Beach, and Westlake Village, signed a lease at Runway for its fifth Southern California location. Neither of these businesses needed to come here. Both of them looked at what already exists on this one block and decided it was worth building on.
What "already exists" actually means
Runway isn't new. Whole Foods, Cinemark, and a run of fast-casual chains have anchored the property for years. What's changed is density of a specific kind: enough sit-down restaurants, packed close enough together, that a single ticketed event can move people from kitchen to kitchen on foot.
That was the whole premise of Taste of Runway on August 27. One ticket bought eight tasting vouchers, redeemable across Sol Cocina, LOQUI, Hopdoddy, PV House, Jeni's Ice Cream, Joliet, Urban Plates, and a preview taste of Dizzy Bird's chargrilled wraps ahead of its official opening. Eight kitchens, one outdoor footprint, one ticket, and Beatrice Rosu, senior marketing manager for RUNWAY Playa Vista, has said the whole point of the annual event is to introduce people to what's new while supporting the restaurants already there. Five years ago that lineup would have needed a shuttle bus. Now it needs a good pair of shoes.
The same compression shows up in where the neighborhood's live entertainment actually happens. Concert Park, tucked inside the Runway complex at 13016 Runway Road, runs the smaller weekly shows with food trucks and blanket seating. Central Park Bandshell, a short walk east at 12000 Waterfront Drive, hosts the bigger tribute-band nights. The Turf at Runway carries the jazz series and the Wednesday market. Three venues, all within a ten-minute walk of each other, functioning as one continuous stage.
A sushi group that doesn't pick casually
Seabutter's existing footprint is worth sitting with for a second: Beverly Hills, Glendale, Laguna Beach, Westlake Village. Those aren't neighborhoods a restaurant group stumbles into. They're markets with established rooftops, high per-capita dining spend, and enough foot traffic to justify a fresh-fish-forward menu with prices to match. Playa Vista is the fifth stop on that list, ahead of plenty of Los Angeles neighborhoods with denser housing counts and longer dining histories.
Public filings for the Runway location describe roughly 47 indoor seats and 16 outdoor seats, a modest footprint that matches the brand's approach elsewhere: tight menus built around a small, well-sourced selection of fish rather than sprawling izakaya-style options. Signage went up over the summer, and as of late August the Runway directory was still flagging the space as "coming soon" without a firm opening date, the kind of quiet buildout that tends to end with a soft open rather than an announcement.
The chicken guy's first non-mall bet
Dizzy Bird's story runs the other direction and lands on the same conclusion. Moumneh's first two locations opened at The Shops at Mission Viejo and Irvine Spectrum, both suburban Orange County retail centers built around big anchor stores and structured parking. Runway Playa Vista is neither. It's an outdoor, mixed-use plaza where the restaurants sit closer to apartments and office buildings than to a mall entrance.
Moumneh signed his lease in March 2026 and started buildout almost immediately. He's described his path here plainly: years working in Taco Bell's corporate marketing and operations arm, a food truck launched in 2015, a modern Mediterranean concept called Falasophy that closed in 2024, and then a pivot to rotisserie chicken built around the Lebanese and Greek flavors he grew up with. Dizzy Bird's third location is expected to open by the end of this year or into early 2027, which means the Taste of Runway preview in August was, for most attendees, their first real interaction with a restaurant that technically doesn't exist yet on Millennium Drive.
The calendar that goes with it
New restaurants alone don't make a neighborhood's rhythm. What backs it up is a run of recurring fixtures and fall-specific programming that all keep landing on the same handful of streets:
- Playa Vista Nights, the Wednesday evening market from 4 to 8 p.m., returned to the Turf with produce vendors, artisanal goods, and live music.
- The Saturday Farmers' Market, a fixture at Runway since 2009, keeps its weekly slot alongside the newer Wednesday addition, giving the block two distinct market days instead of one.
- PV House's one-year anniversary on the Turf marks the restaurant's first full year at Runway, a small milestone that matters more in a retail environment where turnover is common.
- The Halloween Bash brings the Candy Coach, running candy service from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., along with spooky crafts, a photo booth, and a live DJ.
- The Playa Vista Monster Dash 5K, a Halloween-themed fun run through the neighborhood, closes with an after-party hosted by Runway.
None of this is scattered across Playa Vista's wider footprint. It's all inside the same walkable core that hosted the summer's jazz nights and concert series, just with pumpkins instead of patio string lights.
Joliet Café & Bar has leaned into that same logic rather than expanding outward. Instead of opening a second location elsewhere, owner Alejandro Meza opened LivWell Playa, a yoga studio he and his partner run themselves, inside the Free Market space directly across from the restaurant. Go Greek Yogurteria took the spot next to Sol Mexican Cocina, and its owner, Uchenna Ogbunamiri, has talked about the business as a chance to serve the neighborhood she and her family already call home rather than a new market to break into. UPPAbaby is set to join the retail mix by the end of the year or early 2027, a baby gear brand whose pro service director has described the move as being intentional about where the company shows up in person.
What this looks like on an actual weeknight
If you're weighing what a Wednesday actually looks like right now: the produce stalls and live music of Playa Vista Nights start at 4, dinner options from Joliet to Hopdoddy sit within a two-minute walk of the market stalls, and depending on the week you might catch a preview of a restaurant that hasn't technically opened yet. By Halloween, the same footprint swaps market tables for a Candy Coach and a costume-clad 5K.
What's notable isn't that Playa Vista added a sushi restaurant and a chicken shop. It's that both businesses, coming from very different playbooks, looked at the same two hundred yards of Runway Playa Vista and decided the density was already there to build on.
Sam and Rudi walk this stretch of Runway often enough to know which patio fills up first on a Wednesday and which market stall sells out of produce by six. If you want a personal rundown of what's opening next before you plan your own evening around it, reach out to Sam & Rudi.
