When Mickey's Deli decided to open its first new location in more than seventy years, the obvious move would have been another beach block. Instead, the Mance family picked the corner of Inglewood Avenue and Artesia Boulevard, in the space where a Mobil gas station used to sell chips and lottery tickets before its convenience store closed and the site converted to auto repair. Mickey Mance, the founder's grandson, explained the calculus plainly: the corner had heavy traffic and 25 parking spaces, and the original Hermosa Avenue location, beloved as it is, was never an easy place to park and grab a sandwich.
That's the detail worth sitting with if you live in North Redondo Beach. The commercial case for Artesia Boulevard right now isn't ocean proximity or a curated aesthetic. It's parking counts and drive-by traffic, the unglamorous math that makes a street work for daily errands rather than weekend tourism. And that pragmatic logic is exactly why the corridor can support the kind of businesses a beach block often can't sustain: the ones you actually use on a Tuesday.
The corner, and why it got picked
Mickey's Deli #2 opened at 2714 Artesia Boulevard on Saturday, February 28, with a grand opening that ran from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. The first 100 people in line got a free Redondo Chicken Cutlet, a sandwich invented specifically for this location. The new spot is compact, about 1,100 square feet, described by Mickey as "pretty much all kitchen," with a 250-square-foot patio out front. It's a take-out and quick-seating format rather than a replica of the original, and the family says the full menu will eventually mirror both locations, though the Redondo opening started smaller by design.
The timeline matters too. Mickey and his partners had been scouting a second location for about a year and a half before the Mobil site became available. They weren't chasing a trend. They were waiting for the right piece of real estate to open up on a street they already understood, and construction began the previous October. Six months into operation as of this writing, the Redondo location runs seven days a week from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., food-only, no liquor or convenience items the way the Hermosa flagship carries.
The same family is already two doors deep in Riviera Village
Here's what makes the Artesia bet more interesting than a single restaurant opening: it's not the Mance family's first expansion, just their first one into North Redondo. The same ownership group, operating under Bella Vita Hospitality, already runs Salt & Pearl and Vida Modern Mexican + Tequila, both a few blocks from the water in Riviera Village, South Redondo's dense, walkable dining strip. Vida opened there in 2021, Salt & Pearl in 2024.
So the operators who know how to run a restaurant in the most competitive dining block in Redondo Beach looked at Artesia Boulevard and saw something worth a different kind of bet: not a third beach-adjacent concept competing for the same walk-up crowd, but a neighborhood deli built around a gas station's old parking lot and pure convenience. That's not a knock on Artesia. It's a signal that the corridor's value proposition is genuinely different from Riviera Village's, and that difference is what makes it durable rather than derivative.
| Riviera Village (South Redondo) | Artesia Boulevard (North Redondo) | |
|---|---|---|
| Commercial logic | Walkable, ocean-adjacent, destination dining | Traffic count, parking availability, daily convenience |
| Mance family concept | Salt & Pearl, Vida Modern Mexican | Mickey's Deli #2 |
| What draws people | A weekend stroll to the water | A quick stop on the way home |
A street with decades of practice organizing itself
Artesia Boulevard's momentum isn't a one-restaurant story either. The North Redondo Beach Business Association, known locally as NRBBA, has been building recurring programming on this street for a long time. Springfest, the group's carnival and community festival at the Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center, ran its 44th edition this year from April 16 through 19, with rides, food trucks, a teen talent competition, and a beer and wine garden, all presented by South Bay Credit Union.
Dine Around ARTesia & ARTwalk is younger but growing fast. This year marked its fifth run, split across two evenings: the East side of the boulevard on July 29, the West side on August 20. More than 30 restaurants and two dozen local artists took part, wristband holders sampled dishes while wandering past art displays set up inside neighborhood businesses, and for the first time the event added a silent auction for original artwork, with proceeds going to the Redondo Beach Arts Group. NRBBA president Mickey Johnson called it the group's biggest annual chance to show people what makes the corridor special, and every wristband and raffle ticket sold funds student entrepreneurship and scholarship programs at Redondo Union High School.
There's also WalkAbout Redondo, an older Artesia Boulevard event that NRBBA has talked about reviving. In its heyday it drew roughly 60 participating businesses along the street, according to a former NRBBA president who helped run it. Even as a dormant program, that number tells you something: this corridor once had enough retail density to fill a single walking event with 60 stops, and the current NRBBA leadership clearly hasn't let go of that ambition.
None of this is manufactured buzz. It's the same volunteer business association, the same handful of sponsors, running overlapping events for going on half a century. South Bay Credit Union backs both Springfest and Dine Around ARTesia. That kind of repeat institutional sponsorship is what separates a corridor with staying power from a corridor riding one good opening.
What locals actually get out of it
If you live off Artesia, here's the practical shape of what changed this year. You have a new take-out option at Inglewood and Artesia that didn't exist in January, with a menu that's still filling out. You had two evenings this summer where you could walk the boulevard, taste food from more than 30 businesses on a single wristband, and see local art hung inside shops that don't normally double as galleries. And if you have kids, you already know Springfest as the four-day carnival that takes over the Performing Arts Center parking lot every April, a fixture since long before this year.
For everyday recreation, Aviation Park sits on the same lot as the Performing Arts Center, at the corner of Aviation and Manhattan Beach Boulevard. Its 440-yard rubber track is the kind of amenity that doesn't make headlines but gets used constantly, by people walking laps before work, teams running drills in the evening, neighbors who've never once thought of it as a "destination" because it's just theirs.
The read for anyone who already lives here
Put the Mickey's Deli decision next to the NRBBA's calendar and a picture forms that's easy to miss if you only look at one piece at a time. Artesia Boulevard isn't trying to become Riviera Village. It's building something that works on its own terms: a street where a family that already succeeds in the prettiest dining block in South Redondo chose to open somewhere with better parking instead, and where a volunteer business association has kept a festival running for 44 years and a food-and-art walk growing into its fifth. That's not a corridor waiting to be discovered. It's one that already knows what it's good at.
If you're curious what else is changing along Artesia, or you just want to talk through what any of this means for your own corner of North Redondo Beach, Colin Aita is always happy to grab coffee and compare notes. No pressure, just a local conversation.
