The Valley heat has settled in, the jacarandas have finished, and the sidewalk tables along Ventura Boulevard fill up an hour earlier than they did in April. If you have lived in Encino long enough to have a favorite parking spot behind Trader Joe's, you already know the neighborhood does not reinvent itself every summer. It edits. A new tenant opens where an older one closed, the farmers market rotates through stone fruit into melons, and a handful of community dates get penciled onto the calendar you keep on the fridge.
This year the edits are worth paying attention to, because they cluster in a way that rewards residents who move on foot. The best of Encino's summer is packed into roughly two miles of Ventura Boulevard and the parkland just north of it. Here is what has actually changed, and how to plan around it.
Sunday morning still belongs to Victory and Balboa
The ONEgeneration Encino Farmers Market has been the neighborhood's default Sunday for so long that longtime residents forget to recommend it to newcomers. It runs year round, and the 2026 season has been steady. Located at 17400 Victory Boulevard between White Oak and Balboa, the market is open Sundays from 8:00am to 1:00pm, rain or shine, with over 30 farmers from Central and Southern California, more than 25 food vendors, and a portion of proceeds going toward ONEgeneration's community programs.
What to do with that information if you already go every week: pay attention to what shows up in July and August. Summer at the market means raspberries, stone fruit, grapes, figs, melons, pears, peppers, cucumbers, corn, eggplant, and summer squash, and the window for the best figs is narrower than most people plan for. A weekend you skip in mid-August is a weekend you do not get back.
A practical note that will save you a small argument on the way in: non-service animals, including therapy and emotional support animals, are not permitted inside the market. Leave the dog at home and route the walk through Libbit Park afterward.
The most talked-about opening on the boulevard
If one restaurant has defined the neighborhood's spring-to-summer conversation, it is Popular. Popular, the seventh concept from the Tel Aviv Restaurant Group, opened in Encino at 18047 Ventura Blvd, offering Mediterranean fusion cuisine, elevated seafood dishes, and crafted cocktails. The 4,000-square-foot space features a bright modern design with a dining area, a bar with seating for eight, and an outdoor patio, oriented around Mediterranean fusion cuisine and signature sushi.
For residents who track the boulevard's rhythm, two details matter more than the menu writeup. The first: Executive Chef Dor Priezler leads the kitchen with a seafood-forward approach, which is a category Encino has been thin on outside of the sushi bars. The second: the room is designed for lingering rather than turning tables, so a 7:30 reservation on a Saturday tends to stretch past nine. Plan the rest of the evening loose.
If you are trying to build a short walking route out of it, Popular sits close enough to the western cluster of boutiques near the Encino Courtyard that you can pair dinner with a pre-dinner stroll without moving the car twice.
The one Sunday to block off
Most neighborhood events in the Valley do not require a calendar reminder. Encino Fest is the exception, mostly because parking pressure builds quickly and the good hour is the first one. The Encino Neighborhood Council hosts Encino Fest at Encino Park, 16953 Ventura Boulevard, on Sunday, May 31, 2026, from 2 to 5 PM, with a day of live music and performances, free ice cream, and food.
For readers looking ahead to the rest of the summer, there is a lighter roster to know about. A Summer Send Off pool party is scheduled for late July in Encino, and Laemmle Town Center 5 has been programming premieres worth watching. None of these individually make the summer. Together they add up to a neighborhood that still shows up for itself in person, which is worth noticing in a Westside stretch where a lot of civic life has quietly moved online.
A useful habit for anyone new to the neighborhood: check the Encino Neighborhood Council calendar the first Sunday of every month. Most residents discover events three days too late.
When the boulevard gets too warm
By early August the Ventura Boulevard sidewalk is a bad idea between about 1 and 4 PM. The neighborhood's saving grace is that the Sepulveda Basin sits within a five-minute drive of nearly every home south of Burbank Boulevard. The Japanese Garden, the Wildlife Reserve, and the shaded loops around Lake Balboa are the reason a lot of Encino families keep their bikes tuned up in a season most Westside neighborhoods sideline them.
A few things worth doing before Labor Day:
- Walk the Lake Balboa loop early, before 8 AM, when the water is still and the pedal boats have not launched. The path is a mile and a third around, flat, and completely shaded for the first quarter.
- Bring visiting family to the Japanese Garden on a weekday. Weekends have gotten crowded enough that the docents recommend Tuesdays and Thursdays.
- If you have kids in the eight-to-twelve range, the Sepulveda Basin Recreation Area's picnic pavilions take reservations weeks out for weekends but are usually open for weekday afternoons.
These are not secret spots. They are the kind of thing a resident of six years might have stopped visiting because they got busy, and the summer they finally go back is the summer they remember why they moved to Encino in the first place.
Where the neighborhood eats, quietly
Popular is having a moment, and it deserves one. But a longer summer stretches past any single opening. The boulevard's steady list is worth restating for residents who default to the same two places on Friday nights.
For a slower dinner, the Italian and Mediterranean cluster near the Encino Commons anchor is still doing what it does well. For a walk-in on a Tuesday, the ramen and sushi bars east of White Oak keep the same crowd they had before the pandemic and are surprisingly available at 8:30. For a bakery stop after the farmers market, keep the receipts short and the bags small; the walk to the car in July is not the walk it was in March.
The pattern that binds all of this together, and the reason a summer in Encino feels different from a summer in Sherman Oaks or Tarzana, is compression. Restaurants, market, park, community calendar. All of it lives within a walkable ribbon that most residents underuse because the car is right there. The neighborhood rewards the residents who leave the keys at home once a week.
A short list for the rest of the season
If you take one thing from this piece, take the calendar and the geography, not the recommendations. In no particular order:
- Sunday, before 10 AM: farmers market at 17400 Victory Blvd, then a walk.
- Weeknight, after 7 PM: a first visit to Popular at 18047 Ventura Blvd. Book ahead.
- Late morning weekday: the Japanese Garden, then a coffee back on Ventura.
- Any Friday: Lake Balboa loop before dinner, dinner within a mile of home.
- Community night: whatever Laemmle Town Center 5 has programmed that week.
None of this requires a plan. It requires paying attention to the neighborhood you already live in, which is the whole quiet argument for staying rooted in a place like Encino in the first place.
If your summer in Encino has you thinking about the next chapter of your life here, whether that is a larger home south of Ventura, a lock-and-leave closer to the boulevard, or the right moment to bring a property to market, Morgan Goldberg is available for a private conversation about the neighborhood you already know and the one you are considering next.
