The building at Van Nuys Boulevard and Hesby sat dark for six years. Before that, it spent more than six decades as a Googie-style coffee shop, most recently known as Corky's, one of the last intact examples of the swoop-roofed, boomerang-signed architecture that firms like Armet & Davis scattered across Los Angeles in the 1950s and 60s. The city designated it Historic-Cultural Monument #1215 in 2020. Then it closed, and the corner went quiet.
What reopened there in December is not a museum. It's a Chick-fil-A, and the way it got built says more about what's happening on Ventura Boulevard this year than any single restaurant opening could on its own.
Rather than demolish the structure, the company spent more than five years rebuilding it from its original architectural plans, working with architectural historian Alan Hess and designer Miranda Lee to dismantle and reassemble the Palos Verdes stone walls, restore the neon sign, and recreate the zigzag booth seating exactly as it appeared decades ago. The restaurant is run by Brad Boerneke, who has lived in Sherman Oaks for six years and went through a two-year franchisee interview process before opening the doors on December 4, 2025. He reportedly received 1,500 job applications for the location.
That's an unusual amount of money and patience to spend on a fast-food restaurant. It's also a signal. Operators don't sink that kind of capital into a corridor they think is losing relevance. And the Corky's rebuild turns out to be the first data point in a pattern that runs the length of Ventura Boulevard through the rest of 2026: this isn't a neighborhood reinventing its food scene. It's one filling in the hours and blocks the boulevard never quite covered.
The Corridor Gets a Daytime Population
For most of Sherman Oaks' recent history, Ventura Boulevard has run on a dinner clock. Reservations at Asanebo, a table at Teru with its koi pond still out front after 47 years, Katsu-ya, Casita, Taisho, Bacari, BLVD Steak. That lineup isn't going anywhere, and none of this year's arrivals are trying to compete with it directly.
What's changing is what happens on the boulevard between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m., and the reason traces back to a lease signed at the Sherman Oaks Galleria. Industrious inked a 22,000-square-foot coworking deal at Douglas Emmett's Galleria property at 15301 Ventura Boulevard, its first Sherman Oaks location, opening in April across two floors with 257 dedicated office seats and 50 more available on demand. That's a daytime population the Galleria block hasn't had at that density before, and the restaurant openings clustering around it read like a direct response.
Yama Sushi Marketplace has been building out a 7,200-square-foot space at 15300 Ventura Boulevard, its fourth location after West L.A., Koreatown, and San Gabriel, aiming for a late-summer opening with a full liquor license for sake, beer, and Japanese whiskey alongside a grab-and-go counter. CEO Scott Kohno told What Now Los Angeles that the brand had been watching its own Valley customers drive to West L.A. for years before finally deciding to close the gap. "We see the whole Ventura Boulevard as ground zero for sushi in Los Angeles," he said.
That's a marketing line, but it's also a bet on schedule, not just geography. A dinner-only sushi bar would have slotted neatly into the existing Sushi Row lineup down the block. A marketplace built around a fast counter and a bigger catering kitchen is aimed at lunch traffic and 4 p.m. pickup orders, the exact hours a few hundred new office seats a few doors up now generate.
HoneyBaked Ham opened at 14427 Ventura Boulevard on June 22, run by Sherman Oaks residents Tony Vennie and Leslie David Baker, and the pitch leans hard into office catering packages for meetings and workplace lunches, a strange thing to emphasize unless you already know the Galleria just added 300 desks a few blocks away. Gloria by La Era has been aiming to open this summer at 13944 Ventura Boulevard, in the space that held Gracefully Fed until last October, with a cakes-and-pastry menu that reads as a morning-first concept rather than a dinner one.
None of these four businesses are trying to beat Teru's reservation list. They're trying to give a new class of daytime workers somewhere to go between meetings, which is a different market than the one Ventura Boulevard has spent decades serving.
The West End Stops Being a Drive-Through
The other half of the shift is geographic. For years, the boulevard's identity ran east of Van Nuys Boulevard, where the dinner restaurants cluster, while the stretch out toward the Galleria functioned mostly as a place you drove through on the way to a movie. That's changing too, and Hapa Haus is the clearest evidence.
The golf-simulator restaurant and bar is planning roughly 7,983 square feet inside the Galleria, with 69 indoor seats, 48 outdoor seats on a covered patio, five golf simulators, and a Hawaiian-leaning menu, targeting a November opening under owner Alex Miyawaki. Five simulators isn't a driving range. It's a format built for after-work groups and weekend evenings, the kind of thing that gives the Galleria a reason to be a destination on a Thursday night rather than a mall you pass on the way somewhere else.
A few blocks down, Aromas Indian Cuisine is preparing to open at 14350 Ventura Boulevard, in a space that has already carried two prior restaurant tenants, Billa Indian Cuisine and SanSai Japanese Grill. The restaurant is led by Jaspal Singh and Jaspreet Bindra, building a menu around classic Indian dishes, street food, and updated fusion plates. And Burger She Wrote, the wagyu smash-burger project from professional skateboarder Don "Nuge" Nguyen and restaurateur Steven Arroyo, opened its second location this spring at 14245 Ventura Boulevard, six blocks east of Van Nuys Boulevard, a few blocks closer to the traditional dinner row than the Galleria cluster but still part of the same wave.
Put together, that's a corridor stretching its usable footprint in two directions at once. Earlier in the day, and farther west, than it used to bother with.
What the Old Anchors Tell You
The businesses that haven't changed are just as informative as the ones that have. Sushi Note, chef Kiminobu Saito's Michelin-nodded counter, moved into the old Bizen space back in 2018 and has anchored that end of the boulevard ever since. Asanebo is still across the street from where it's always been. Teru is still pulling regulars in for the koi pond. None of this year's new tenants are trying to displace them, which is itself the point. The boulevard isn't being remade. It's being filled in around a dinner identity that was already working fine.
What Never Stopped
Through all of this, the Sherman Oaks Farmers Market has kept its own schedule, unbothered by any of it. Every Tuesday afternoon into early evening, the market sets up in the Westfield Fashion Square parking lot with produce stalls, prepared food vendors, and live bands playing for free, a fixture that runs year-round regardless of what's opening or closing along the boulevard a few blocks away. If none of the new restaurants interest you, the market was never going anywhere either.
That contrast is worth sitting with. A neighborhood can add a golf simulator, a sushi marketplace, and a restored Googie landmark in the same twelve months and still have its most dependable weekly gathering be a produce stand that hasn't changed its format in years. Both things are true about Sherman Oaks right now, and neither cancels the other out.
Where things stand as of this fall:
- Yama Sushi Marketplace, 15300 Ventura Blvd #102G, aimed for a late-summer 2026 opening
- Hapa Haus, Sherman Oaks Galleria at 15301 Ventura Blvd, targeting November
- HoneyBaked Ham, 14427 Ventura Blvd, open since June 22
- Burger She Wrote, 14245 Ventura Blvd, open since spring
- Gloria by La Era, 13944 Ventura Blvd, aimed for a summer opening
- Aromas Indian Cuisine, 14350 Ventura Blvd, opening date not yet announced
- Industrious, Sherman Oaks Galleria at 15301 Ventura Blvd, open since April
- Chick-fil-A, 5043 Van Nuys Blvd, open since December 4, 2025
A corridor doesn't fill in its dayparts and its geography by accident. Operators who sign seven-year leases are making a read on who's going to be walking through Sherman Oaks for years to come, and this year's read points toward more people, more hours in use, and a boulevard that works for a Tuesday lunch as well as it always has for a Friday dinner reservation.
If you're the kind of person who tracks these shifts because you live among them, you already know the boulevard better than any single list of openings can capture. If you're ever curious how changes like these connect to the broader Sherman Oaks market, Nancy Cassidy has been paying attention to this corridor for a long time. Let's Connect — Schedule a Consultation.
