"Circle Bar isn't just a bar," Mark Van Gessel said the week before he reopened it. "It's part of Santa Monica's cultural DNA. Everyone has a Circle Bar story."
He would know. Van Gessel and his wife Addie already run Hinano Cafe in Venice and Tavern on Main a few blocks south, so when the oval-shaped dive bar at 2926 Main Street went dark in August 2023 after 74 years, they were the ones the neighborhood expected to bring it back. On May 22, 2026, they did. The floor plan is untouched, the vintage sign is back over the sidewalk, and a new elevated DJ booth called The Halo now anchors the room, wired with QSC speakers and a Chauvet lighting rig that wraps the old disco ball. Thursday through Saturday, 6 p.m. to 2 a.m., Circle Bar is open again.
That reopening landed in the middle of a spring that had already taken two other Santa Monica institutions off the board, and looking at the three stories together tells you something about this city that a single headline never could.
The Same Spring, Two Blocks Said Goodbye
Four weeks before Circle Bar reopened, The Misfit poured its last round. The bar and restaurant had occupied the ground floor of Santa Monica's landmark 1929 Clock Tower Building since 2011, building a reputation for an Art Deco room, a happy hour that trade press kept naming the best in the city, and a crowd that showed up for both. On its final night, April 18, patrons waited as long as three and a half hours for one more table.
The closure wasn't about empty seats. Operator LGO Hospitality, run by founder Bob Lynn, said in a statement that a "revolving door of five building ownership entities" had chipped away at the space over the years until the lease no longer made sense to renew. Lynn is now focused on two newer LGO properties on Wilshire Boulevard, Diner Antonette and La Grande Orange Grocery, and hasn't ruled out bringing The Misfit back somewhere else in the city. As of that same April, vacancy along the Third Street Promenade had climbed to 28.5 percent, a number Fox 11 reported even as city officials pointed to roughly 17 new businesses slated to open downtown in the months ahead.
A block over, Britannia Pub was already counting down its own final weeks. The pub had held its Santa Monica Boulevard address for 30 years, and its lease is set to expire July 31. Britannia isn't disappearing. Owners told CBS Los Angeles they've already secured a new location and that "the next evolution of the pub will see the Cain boys taking the reins," keeping the business in the family even as it leaves the block. What's moving into the vacated space tells its own story: a Taco Bell Cantina, one of the 17 incoming businesses officials are counting toward downtown's comeback.
Main Street Wasn't Spared Either
It would be tidy to say Third Street Promenade struggled while Main Street sailed through unscathed. It didn't. The same April that took down The Misfit also closed Holey Grail Donuts at 2441 Main Street, just a few blocks from where Circle Bar would reopen a month later. Main Street lost a business in the identical stretch of weeks that Downtown lost two.
The difference shows up in what happens next. A dessert chain called La Diperie, which specializes in dipped ice cream and is opening its first West Coast location, has already signed on for the old Holey Grail space, with an end-of-summer 2026 opening planned. Main Street's vacancy got filled within the same season it opened up. Third Street Promenade's marquee corner sat empty for the better part of a year before officials started naming names.
The Difference Wasn't the Address
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only read the closures as a single trend line: what separates these two stretches of the city right now isn't foot traffic, rent, or even how beloved the outgoing business was. The Misfit had lines around the block on its way out the door. Britannia had three decades of regulars. Neither lacked customers. What they lacked was a landlord, or in The Misfit's case, five of them in a row, willing to let a long-running local operator keep doing what it had always done.
Circle Bar didn't reopen because Main Street is somehow immune to that problem. It reopened because the people who took the keys already had two other addresses within walking distance and had spent years proving they could run a room the neighborhood trusted. The Van Gessels weren't new capital scouting a market. They were already in it, and when the space came open, they were the obvious call.
That's the same logic working in reverse Downtown. When Britannia's lease ran out, the corridor didn't backfill with another local pub built by someone who already had skin in the block. It filled with a Taco Bell Cantina, part of a wave of national names moving in fast because they can, not because they've spent a decade building the kind of following that gets your bar's name in a headline the week it reopens. Both corridors are being reshaped right now. One is being reshaped by people who already live in the neighborhood they're betting on. The other is being reshaped by companies that don't need to.
What's Actually Open This Fall
If you're deciding where to spend a Friday night in Santa Monica this season, here's where things stand:
- Circle Bar is open Thursday through Saturday, 6 p.m. to 2 a.m., at 2926 Main Street, with private bookings available Sunday through Wednesday.
- The Misfit's Clock Tower space on Santa Monica Boulevard is empty, with LGO Hospitality still hunting for a new location for the brand elsewhere in the city.
- Britannia Pub is running out its final weeks at its longtime Santa Monica Boulevard address through July 31, with a relocation already lined up under the same ownership family.
- Taco Bell Cantina and Raising Cane's are among roughly 17 businesses expected to open in the Third Street Promenade area in the coming months, part of the city's push to refill the corridor.
- La Diperie is set to open at 2441 Main Street by the end of summer 2026, taking over the space Holey Grail Donuts vacated in April.
None of that tells you which bar to pick on a given Saturday. It does tell you that the two ends of Santa Monica's nightlife map are being rebuilt by very different kinds of hands, and that the one with a longer memory is, for now, the one bringing its history back intact.
If you're new to the neighborhood and wondering why longtime residents still bring up a bar that's been closed since 2023, or why a chain restaurant taking over a 30-year-old pub's address feels like bigger news than it should, that's the texture of a city working through the same question a lot of Los Angeles neighborhoods are asking right now. It's part of what makes paying attention to a place like Santa Monica worth doing block by block instead of headline by headline.
If you're curious what any of this means for property values, lease terms, or what's actually for sale nearby, that's a different conversation, and one Simon Mashian is always glad to have. Let's Connect.
