New Restaurants in Woodland Hills: Familiar Spaces, New Menus

Drive past Topanga Village on a weekday afternoon and the old Veggie Grill sign is gone, replaced by paper covering the windows and a permit notice taped to the glass. A few miles east on Ventura Boulevard, the auto garage that used to be Nix Automotive Service sits behind orange fencing, waiting on a different kind of project. Neither building is new. Both are about to become something Woodland Hills has been talking about since the announcements landed this month.

The pattern is worth sitting with for a second, because it is not really about two restaurants. It is about what it takes to open a restaurant in this part of the Valley right now. Woodland Hills is not getting brand-new construction this year. It is getting two established names moving into spaces someone else already built, wired, and walked away from.

A Sandwich Shop With Two Michelin Stars Behind the Counter

Bread Head, the Los Angeles sandwich shop founded by chefs Alex Williams and Jordan Snyder, is opening its fourth location inside Topanga Village this December, in the suite Veggie Grill vacated. Williams and Snyder met working the line at Trois Mec, where they each earned a Michelin star, before building Bread Head through pop-ups and catering and eventually partnering with CEO Greg Willsey and Michael Pasternak, formerly of Night + Market, to formalize the group.

The expansion pace tells you how fast this concept has moved. Bread Head opened its first shop in Santa Monica in June 2024, followed by Manhattan Beach in June 2025 and Westwood that November. Woodland Hills is stop four, arriving two and a half years after the first location opened, with a fifth already planned for Thousand Oaks in 2027.

"We could not be more excited about our new location at Topanga Village and shortly thereafter in Thousand Oaks," Willsey said in the company's announcement.

The Woodland Hills shop will keep the format familiar to fans of the other locations: house-baked focaccia, a rotating sandwich lineup, indoor and outdoor seating, and NFL Sunday Ticket on the televisions. It slots into a dining roster at Topanga Village that already includes Cava, Bacio di Latte, Dan Modern Chinese, EMC Seafood, Eureka!, Joey's Woodland Hills, Pitfire Pizza, Sweetfin Poke, and Wokcano, alongside retail anchors like Costco, Crate & Barrel, Fabletics, REI, and Sur La Table. Veggie Grill closed six California locations in 2023, including this one. Bread Head is stepping into a suite that already has plumbing, a hood system, and a dining room built for volume.

A Burger Stand That Refuses to Franchise, Moving Into an Old Garage

The second project is a different kind of institution. Original Tommy's World Famous Hamburgers is planning a new drive-thru at 20032 Ventura Boulevard, on the lot that used to house Nix Automotive Service. The chain traces back to a single stand at Beverly and Rampart Boulevards, opened in 1946 by Tom Koulax, the son of Greek immigrants. It has stayed family-owned ever since. Koulax's daughter, Cynthia, still runs the company; Tommy's has 32 locations across California and Nevada, rather than hundreds under franchise agreements. The family has also gone to court more than 20 times over the decades to protect the chain's shack-style logo and cursive script from imitators.

Woodland Hills has been a gap in the map for a chain that already sits in Canoga Park, Burbank, North Hills, Van Nuys, Simi Valley, and Ventura, communities that ring this stretch of the Valley without quite reaching Ventura Boulevard itself. Project filings describe a 1,300-square-foot restaurant with a two-lane drive-thru, 657 square feet of patio space, 33 stand-up seats, and 32 sit-down seats. No opening date has been announced, but the menu is the one regulars already know: chili cheeseburgers, chili cheese fries, chili dogs, tamales, and a breakfast counter with a sausage sandwich and burrito. In May 2026 the chain marked its 80th anniversary by selling 80-cent chili cheeseburgers across all 32 locations, a small nod to the math of 1946 to 2026.

Same Corridor, Two Different Kinds of Reuse

Both projects took over a shell that already had the hard parts solved. Bread Head inherited a second-generation restaurant suite, meaning it can open in December instead of waiting through a year of construction. Tommy's is converting a commercial lot that already had the zoning and access for a drive-thru style operation, with the paperwork now running through a site-plan review and specific-plan exception rather than a ground-up entitlement fight.

This is not an isolated coincidence. Earlier this year, Danny Boy's opened its third New York-style pizza location inside Valley Country Mart, taking over retail space that had already been built out for food service. Woodland Hills keeps adding names to its restaurant lineup, but the buildings doing the work are the same ones that have been standing along Ventura Boulevard and inside its shopping centers for years. What changes is who is behind the counter.

For anyone who eats along this stretch of Ventura Boulevard, the practical upshot is straightforward. The suite that used to smell like Veggie Grill's grain bowls will smell like fresh focaccia by the time holiday shopping picks up at Topanga Village. The lot that used to have a tow truck parked out front will have a drive-thru line by the time Tommy's finishes its permitting. Woodland Hills isn't waiting on new development to change its food scene. It's watching familiar walls change hands.

If you're the kind of person who wants to know what's opening before the sign goes up, that habit of paying attention to a neighborhood block by block is exactly how Bruce Barz approaches Woodland Hills real estate too. Reach out anytime to talk about what's changing in this corner of the Valley.