I have walked past 155 S. Barrington Place more times than I can count over the last two years, and the windows are still papered over. A liquor license application went up in that storefront in January 2024, naming the tenant as Terroni Brentwood. In the time since, All Roads Pinseria + Enoteca opened two doors down and has kept its doors open from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week, ever since. The Wilkes took over a shuttered building down the block, gutted it, restored it, and threw open its doors. Sushi Miyagi kept serving omakase at the same corner it has occupied since 2019, never once making news for anything other than the food.
Terroni's windows are still papered.
That contrast is the actual story of Brentwood Village right now, more than any single opening is. The gap between a six-month turnaround and a two-year wait is not about buzz, chef pedigree, or how badly the neighborhood wants Italian food again. It is about what was already inside the walls when the new tenant signed the lease.
The Space That Didn't Need to Be Built
All Roads Pinseria + Enoteca opened at 145 S. Barrington Ave. on July 26, 2024, after a soft debut a few days earlier. It came from Toscana Restaurant Group, with chef Luca Crestanelli, who trained at Brentwood's own Vincenti Ristorante under chef Nicola Mastronardi and helped launch Bar Toscana back in 2010, running the kitchen alongside wine director Roberto Facciolla. Before the All Roads signage went up, the same storefront had carried a liquor license application under a placeholder name, Nuvola, while the buildout finished quietly behind papered glass.
The point is not the pinsa, the Roman-style dough that swaps in rice and soy flour for a lighter crust, though it is a genuine draw. The point is that 145 S. Barrington Ave. was already a working restaurant shell. Whoever moved in after the previous tenant left was renovating an existing kitchen, not pouring a new one. That is the difference between a buildout that takes months and one that takes years.
The Building That Took Fourteen Months, Even With Everything Already There
The Wilkes is the counterexample that proves the rule has nuance. Its space at 148 S. Barrington Ave. was also an existing restaurant shell, most recently home to the beloved Brentwood Restaurant & Lounge and, before that, the short-lived Baja Norte. A liquor license application for the address surfaced in the fall of 2024. The Wilkes did not open until November 3, 2025, about fourteen months later.
The difference is that chef and owner Dana Slatkin, who also runs Westwood's Violet, was not doing a straightforward swap. The building was designed in 1954 by architect Alfred T. Wilkes, for whom a young Frank Gehry once worked as a draftsman, and Slatkin brought in preservation specialists Toni Lewis and Marc Schoeplein of Lewis/Schoeplein Architects specifically to protect the original bones rather than gut them. The bar sits in its original spot, now finished in polished black Rossi marble under a stained-glass fanlight. The old sushi space next door became what the team calls the Hearth Room, built around a working fireplace.
"What I loved about The Brentwood is that it never felt trendy. It was just timeless," Slatkin has said of the space she inherited. That instinct, to preserve rather than erase, is exactly why fourteen months felt long to anyone walking by with a stroller and a coffee, and exactly why the building now reads like it has been there for seventy years rather than seven months.
So the lesson from the first two storefronts is not simply "existing shell equals fast." It is closer to: existing shell plus a straightforward swap moves in months, while existing shell plus a genuine restoration still takes over a year, even when nobody has to touch a slab.
The One That's Still Waiting
Which brings us back to 155 S. Barrington Place. Terroni Brentwood's liquor license application dates to January 2024. Proprietor Sheereen Koules was targeting a spring 2026 opening as of the most recent reporting on the project. That would put the gap between filing and opening day at somewhere past two years, assuming that timeline holds.
The earlier reporting on the same address, back when the buildout first became visible, described the work behind the storefront glass as exactly that: a buildout, not a renovation of an intact kitchen. That is the detail that separates Terroni from All Roads and The Wilkes. It is not a question of demand. Brentwood has wanted a Terroni for a while, and the neighborhood already has a strong appetite for Italian food, evidenced by longtime local names like Peppone and old-school Divino sitting within a block of the new arrivals. It is a question of what kind of construction is happening behind the paper.
Here is how the three timelines actually stack up:
- All Roads Pinseria + Enoteca, 145 S. Barrington Ave. Existing restaurant shell. Opened July 26, 2024.
- The Wilkes, 148 S. Barrington Ave. Existing restaurant shell, full historic restoration. License activity surfaced fall 2024. Opened November 3, 2025, about fourteen months later.
- Terroni Brentwood, 155 S. Barrington Place. Ground-up buildout. License application filed January 2024. Still not open as of the most recent published update, more than two years later.
The Corner That Never Changed at All
Sushi Miyagi offers the quietest version of this same pattern. The corner spot at 150 S. Barrington Ave. had already cycled through Saketini and then Cafe Brentwood before chef Shinichi Miyagi and his wife, Mihoko Nakada, opened their omakase-only counter there on August 1, 2019. Miyagi trained in Osaka from age sixteen, ran his own kappo restaurant by twenty-five, moved to the U.S. in 2001, and worked his way through Sasabune, Matsuhisa, and Q before helping open the well-regarded Sushi I-naba in Manhattan Beach. He and Nakada run the front and back of house themselves, with barely any other staff, serving tasting menus that run from $160 to $260 a seat.
Seven years on the same corner, in a space that had already been two other restaurants before it, is not an accident. It is the same math as All Roads: an existing kitchen, a straightforward transition, and an operator who knew exactly what they wanted to do with it from day one.
The Empty Storefronts Are Making the Same Argument
Two nearby spaces make the negative case just as clearly. Roast Deli & Market's storefront at 147 S. Barrington Ave. went dark, its windows papered and its signs pulled down, with no announced successor. A few doors over, the space that once held Maria's Italian Kitchen, a longtime neighborhood favorite, has sat vacant and listed for rent.
Neither closure is mysterious once you apply the same lens. Nobody has started a buildout in either space yet. Once a lease is signed and a tenant is renovating an already-functional kitchen, Brentwood Village tends to move fast, as All Roads and Sushi Miyagi both showed. Until that happens, a storefront just sits, regardless of how good the corner is or how much foot traffic passes it every morning.
What This Actually Means If You're Walking Barrington This Month
None of this changes what's actually good to eat on the block right now. All Roads is still the easy weeknight answer for pinsa and a glass of something Italian. The Wilkes has become the place people book for a birthday, not a Tuesday. Sushi Miyagi remains the reservation you plan around, not the one you make same-day. For the Win, the smash burger spot that opened next to the UPS Store, is the fast, low-key option nobody's written a feature about, which is exactly the point of a smash burger. Hank's Bagels, which already has locations in Burbank and Sherman Oaks, is moving into the old Yu Cake space on Barrington Court, just off the Village's main corridor, adding one more easy morning stop to a Village that already has more bagel options than it strictly needs.
But if you want to know why one storefront reopens in a season while another sits taped over for years, the answer is behind the glass, not in the neighborhood's appetite. Brentwood Village wants all of these restaurants. It just can't make the drywall go up any faster.
If you're the kind of Brentwood resident who tracks which storefronts are moving fast and which ones are stalled, you already understand this neighborhood better than most real estate searches will tell you. Simon Mashian works this stretch of the Westside daily, from the Village's two-block food scene to the streets around it, and is always glad to talk through what's actually changing here, whether or not you're in the market. Let's Connect.
