Walk into Tiger Tiger on Santa Monica Boulevard this month and you'll still find tiger paintings on the wall and jade-green tones in the dining room. The bones are the same. The name on the door is not. Eighteen months ago, that room opened as 88 Club, the Top Chef winner Mei Lin's return to fine dining after the pandemic closed her acclaimed Nightshade downtown. It was, by any measure, the most talked-about restaurant debut the Golden Triangle had seen in years. It is also gone.
That's the part worth sitting with if you actually live here and eat on this stretch of Beverly Hills. The neighborhood's restaurant scene has a rhythm most visitors never notice: the splashiest new openings are, right now, moving faster than the empty storefronts they were supposed to replace. A restaurant with a Top Chef name attached to it had a shorter run than the vacancy left behind by the steakhouse two blocks over. That's not a coincidence worth glossing over. It's the actual shape of dining here in 2026.
The Fastest Flip on Santa Monica Boulevard
88 Club opened in April 2025 as a joint project between Mei Lin and restaurateur Francis Miranda, the same team behind Nightshade and the fried-chicken hit Daybird. The room was deliberately intimate: 44 seats, deep green walls, a five-seat cocktail bar, vintage Chinese dinnerware Miranda had hunted down at flea markets. Miranda talked about it at the time as the project that would finally give his team the shot Nightshade never got to finish.
"I think I'll finally get to give myself and the team the best shot at creating an institution."
An institution didn't quite happen. In April 2026, almost exactly a year after opening, Mei Lin announced on Instagram that she was leaving 88 Club for other projects. The restaurant stayed open under chef David Hernandez for a stretch, but by early September the concept had changed entirely. It's now Tiger Tiger, run by a chef who came out of Jiang Nan Spring, with a wider Chinese-American menu that adds General Tso's chicken, crab rangoon, and a mapo tofu alongside salt-and-pepper shrimp. There's a $50 lobster dish on the menu, too, which for this stretch of Beverly Hills is a fairly modest ask.
Total lifespan of 88 Club as its own concept: about seventeen months, chef included.
Meanwhile, Around the Corner on Canon
Compare that to what happened a few blocks away at 267 N. Canon Drive. The Palm, the celebrity steakhouse that had anchored that address for decades, closed in October 2023. Regulars felt it. The space sat dark for the better part of three years while Quality Branded, the New York restaurant group behind the original Bad Roman, worked out its West Coast debut in that exact footprint. Bad Roman didn't reopen the room until the late spring of 2026, and early reviews describe a maximalist Italian menu that's already outperforming its Manhattan original in the eyes of some diners.
Do the math and the vacancy at 267 N. Canon Drive outlasted the entire run of 88 Club. A storefront sitting empty for roughly two and a half years took longer to refill than it took for Beverly Hills' most-hyped new restaurant to open, lose its headline chef, and become something else entirely.
Here's how the timelines actually stack up:
| Address | What happened | Key dates | Duration |
|---|---|---|---|
| 267 N. Canon Drive | Palm Restaurant closed, later became Bad Roman | Closed Oct. 2023 → reopened late spring 2026 | ~2.5 years vacant |
| Santa Monica Boulevard | 88 Club opened, later became Tiger Tiger | Opened April 2025 → chef departed April 2026 → rebranded by Sept. 2026 | ~17 months, start to finish |
| 453 N. Canon Drive | New build from the Chol family | Opened March 28, 2026 | Still running |
What's Actually Open Right Now
If you're deciding where to eat this month rather than tracking the history, the current lineup on this stretch looks like this:
- Tiger Tiger (Santa Monica Boulevard) — the new Chinese-American concept in the former 88 Club space, broader menu, still finding its footing with reviewers.
- Bad Roman (267 N. Canon Drive) — maximalist Italian, private dining rooms that can combine for parties up to 60, in the space the Palm occupied for decades.
- Azur (453 N. Canon Drive) — a French-Mediterranean restaurant and lounge from Erik and Florence Chol, the couple behind Santa Monica's LouLou and the historic Globe Theatre revival downtown. It opened March 28, 2026, with executive chef Stanley Suchy running the kitchen and a terrace built for people-watching on Canon.
- Mr. Chow — still exactly where it's always been, a few blocks from the Tiger Tiger space, more than fifty years into a run that shows no sign of ending.
That last one matters more than it might seem. Miranda himself, when he opened 88 Club, called out Mr. Chow's decades on the Beverly Hills scene as the standard his own project was chasing. His restaurant didn't get there. Mr. Chow, quietly, still is.
The One Thing That Hasn't Moved in Thirty-Two Years
None of this turnover touches the Beverly Hills Farmers' Market, and that's worth knowing if you want a piece of the neighborhood's routine that doesn't reset every eighteen months. It's been running every Sunday, 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., rain or shine, on the 9300 block of Civic Center Drive since the early 1990s, now well into its thirties as an institution. Free two-hour parking in the Civic Center garage, the same certified California growers many residents have been buying from for years, and none of the lease uncertainty that seems to follow every glossy restaurant opening on Canon or Santa Monica Boulevard.
That contrast is the real takeaway for anyone who actually lives inside the Golden Triangle rather than visiting it for a weekend. The restaurant marquees change fast enough that loyalty to a specific name is a short-term bet. The market, the walk to Beverly Canon Gardens, the general rhythm of a Sunday morning here, that's the part of the neighborhood that's actually stable. Reserve dinner where you like this season. Just don't assume the room will still be under the same name by the time you go back.
If you're weighing what any of this means for property on or near this stretch of the Golden Triangle, that's a longer conversation, and one worth having with someone who tracks it block by block. Simon Mashian works this part of Beverly Hills regularly and is always glad to talk through what's actually happening on the ground here. Let's connect.
