Walk the two blocks of 87th Street in the Westchester Triangle on a Sunday morning and you will pass a farmers market, a wine bar, a bookstore, a Thai restaurant with a line out front, and a restaurant recognized in the Michelin Guide. None of it is new construction. Every one of those storefronts existed before the current tenant moved in, and that detail matters more than it sounds like it should.
Two blocks away, on Sepulveda Boulevard, the story is the opposite. An eight-story apartment building is under construction where Dinah's Family Restaurant used to serve the neighborhood before it closed in 2024. A few blocks north, plans call for two more towers on the site of the old Staples. Westchester is growing in two directions at once right now, and the reason the Triangle still feels like a small town is that almost none of that growth is landing on 87th Street itself.
A Two-Block Stretch, Three New Reasons To Stop
The name most people are talking about is Tomat, at 6261 W. 87th St., which earned a spot in the Michelin Guide for a menu built around small local farms, including produce from Two Peas in a Pod Farm that shows up in everything from Brussels sprouts to soft serve at Tomat's takeover of the block. Owners Posner and Dial opened it in a building that has been in Dial's family since the 1940s, when her great-grandmother started a real estate company that passed to her grandfather and then to her mother, who bought the building outright in 2017.
A few doors down, Triangle Wines opened at 6235 W. 87th St. after four years of planning by the Belotto family, longtime Westchester residents whose history on this stretch goes back decades, including a foreign car repair shop one relative's father ran nearby before it was torn down for a high rise. The shop pours a rotating list of organic and vegan-friendly wines and leans on its neighbors for food, sending customers to Olive It two doors down for sandwiches and charcuterie that pair with whatever is open behind the bar that week.
Then there is The Book Jewel, the independent bookstore Karen Dial opened in August 2020, now heading into its sixth year in the Triangle. Three storefronts, three different owners on paper, and one name that keeps surfacing underneath them.
The Overflow Economy On 87th Street
None of these businesses operate in isolation, and that is by design rather than accident. Ayara Thai and Truxton's both draw waits long enough that customers duck into Triangle Wines to sit with a glass until their table is ready, then carry sandwiches over from Olive It if they want food with it. The two shops have talked about building a shared QR code to route customers between them, which is a small thing, but it points at a working answer to a real problem: a wine bar with no kitchen and a restaurant with no bar can solve each other's gap if they are standing next to each other.
Here is what sits on that stretch today, based on what the businesses themselves and local coverage confirm:
| Business | Address | What it offers | Neighbor connection |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tomat | 6261 W. 87th St. | Farm-driven dinner menu, Michelin Guide listing | Building owned by the Dial family since 2017 |
| Triangle Wines | 6235 W. 87th St. | Wine bar, rotating list, craft beer | Sends customers to Olive It for food |
| The Book Jewel | Westchester Triangle | Independent bookstore, opened August 2020 | Opened by Karen Dial |
| Olive It | Near Triangle Wines | Sandwiches, charcuterie boards | Cross-promotes with Triangle Wines |
| Park Place Liquor & Deli | Westchester Triangle | Gourmet sandwiches, wine pairings | Serves overflow from area restaurants |
A two-block commercial strip that small does not usually generate this much foot traffic on its own. It works because the businesses are functioning like one loose operation instead of five competing ones.
One Name Keeps Showing Up
Here is the part that most write-ups about new Westchester restaurants skip over. Dial, one of Tomat's owners, comes from a family whose real estate holdings, dating back to a company her great-grandmother founded in the 1940s, include the very building the restaurant sits in. Karen Dial, who shares that surname and opened The Book Jewel a few doors down, is named alongside the Drollinger Family Charitable Foundation as a longtime supporter of the Westchester Certified Farmers' Market. The same foundation sponsors Ballet Beyond Borders at Loyola Marymount University, and Drollinger Properties, the company behind much of the block, has sponsored the Westchester Team Challenge, which funds neighborhood beautification work.
That is not a coincidence of a small town where everyone knows everyone. It is a specific pattern: one family's property holdings and philanthropy touching the restaurant everyone is talking about, the bookstore heading into its sixth year, and the market that draws a crowd every Sunday. The Triangle's recent run of openings looks like organic small business revival from the sidewalk, and in a real sense it is, but the ground underneath a lot of it traces back to a single Westchester family.
What's Rising Two Blocks Away
None of that steady, low-rise character applies to Sepulveda Boulevard right now. Construction started in early 2026 on the Lunelle Apartments at 6501 S. Sepulveda Blvd., an eight-story, 362-unit building with 3,300 square feet of ground-floor retail and a 463-car garage, on the site of Dinah's Family Restaurant, which closed in 2024 after decades of business. The developer's own timeline puts completion in 2028.
A few blocks north, the Staples store that used to sit across the street from Tomat came down in the summer of 2025. In its place, Spokane-based SRM Development has proposed two buildings, one seven stories and one eight, at 8704 Sepulveda Blvd. and 8711 Sepulveda Eastway. Together they would add roughly 266 units of senior housing: 146 senior apartments with about 3,300 square feet of commercial space and a new pedestrian plaza in one building, and 120 assisted and independent living units with street-level dining in the other. City Council has also upheld approval of a separate mixed-use project at 6136 W. Manchester Ave. from developer Cityview, which would add more housing and retail on Manchester Avenue.
Every one of these projects sits on Sepulveda or Manchester. None of them sit on 87th Street. The Triangle is not shrinking while the corridor around it grows taller. It is staying exactly the size it has always been, and the density that would otherwise have to squeeze into those two blocks is landing somewhere else instead.
The Rituals That Still Run On Foot
The parts of Westchester life that have not changed are worth naming too, because they are the reason the Triangle still reads as a neighborhood and not just a strip of tenants:
- The Westchester Certified Farmers' Market runs every Sunday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at 6200 W. 87th St., rain or shine, year round
- The Second Saturday Stroll turns the Triangle into a monthly showcase of local art, music, dining, and shopping
- The LAX Coastal Chamber of Commerce hosts an annual Fourth of July parade along Loyola Blvd. from Westchester Park to Loyola Marymount University
- The muralist David Russell painted the "Welcome to Westchester" mural that greets traffic coming into the neighborhood, one of several murals he has done around town
None of that requires a car, a reservation, or a construction permit. It just requires showing up on the right day.
The version of this story that gets written most often treats new restaurant openings and rising apartment towers as the same kind of neighborhood change. They are not. One is a small, tightly connected group of local owners, some of them related, filling old storefronts with new tenants. The other is a different scale of development entirely, aimed at a different stretch of pavement. Westchester residents walking the Triangle on a Sunday are seeing the first story. The one on Sepulveda is happening at the same time, just not on the same block.
If you are trying to make sense of what a particular pocket of Westchester is actually worth, given what is staying small and what is going vertical two blocks over, that is exactly the kind of read Danny Mishevski works through with clients across the Westside every week. Let's Connect.
