Walk down Manchester Avenue past the Staples and the independent bookstore, and you'll hit a glass-walled dining room with forest green tiles, burnt-orange leather seats, and a rooftop that's finally open after months of buildout. That's Tomat, the farm-to-table restaurant that's become the thing people in Westchester talk about at pickup lines and dog parks. The coffee and croissant crowd shows up before LAX runs. The dinner crowd shows up for the seasonal menu and the private event space upstairs.
Here's what most of that dinner crowd doesn't know. The building Tomat sits in isn't a developer's bet on a changing market. It's been in one family since the 1940s.
The Family That Owned the Building Before It Was a Restaurant
Tomat's co-owner Natalie Dial grew up with Westchester roots that go back generations. Her great-grandmother started a real estate company in the 1940s, and it passed down through her grandfather before landing with her mother, who purchased the building that now houses Tomat back in 2017. A restaurant tenant was lined up to take the space. Then, in the summer of 2019, that deal fell through.
Dial and her husband Harry Posner, both working as a doctor and a public health specialist at the time and living in London, were already weighing a move back to Los Angeles. When the previous tenant walked away, they took the opening themselves. Neither had run a restaurant before. What they had was a building that had been sitting in the family for two years with no clear use, and a neighborhood Dial had watched cycle through decades of change.
That's the part worth sitting with if you live here. The best new table in Westchester didn't happen because an outside investor spotted an opportunity. It happened because a family finally decided to use property they already owned.
Why So Many Storefronts on Manchester Struggled to Stick
Dial has talked about watching Westchester go through what she calls an "identity crisis" after big box stores moved in during the 1980s, replacing a strip that had been pedestrian-friendly and full of mom-and-pop shops. That shift didn't happen in a vacuum. A few miles away, the coastal community of Surfridge was bought out by LAX in the 1960s and bulldozed in 1975 to make way for airport expansion, eventually becoming the El Segundo Blue Butterfly Preserve. The emptying out of that coastal development pushed local business away from the area entirely, and Westchester absorbed the disruption.
That history explains something residents have probably felt without naming it. This neighborhood's commercial strip has never had a smooth run. It's had long stretches of vacancy and turnover broken up by whichever tenant was willing to bet on Manchester Avenue at that particular moment. Tomat's rooftop opening isn't a sign the whole corridor suddenly changed. It's a sign one specific building, held by one family through decades of that turnover, finally got activated.
The Old Guard Never Left
While Tomat gets the attention right now, the restaurants that actually defined Westchester's food identity through all those cycles are still doing exactly what they've always done.
| Spot | Known For | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| Ayara Thai | Widely considered Westchester's best-known restaurant | A reliable dinner you don't have to think about |
| Aliki's | Excellent Greek food at prices that stay affordable | Weeknight dinners on repeat |
| Shokudo | A comforting bowl of udon | Casual dinner near LAX |
| The Proud Bird | LAX-adjacent food hall | Families with kids who need options |
| Caravan Swim Club | Poolside cocktails at Hotel June | An afternoon drink, not a full meal |
| Tomat | Farm-to-table dinner, rooftop bar, private event space | The neighborhood's newest anchor |
And then there's the ritual that has nothing to do with any of this. The In-N-Out run before or after a flight is close to a rite of passage for anyone who lives near LAX, Tomat included. Its own owners point to the airport as part of what makes the restaurant's location interesting rather than a liability. A morning flight is a good excuse for a cappuccino and a croissant before the terminal.
The Calendar That Doesn't Depend on Any of This
None of the food news changes what already happens here every year. The Pacific Area Boosters Association brought the Westchester Community Carnival back this past May, running three days along Manchester Avenue with rides, games, and family entertainment, with proceeds supporting the LAPD Pacific Area's Cadet and Junior Cadet programs. It's become enough of a fixture that longtime residents plan around it the way other neighborhoods plan around a farmers market.
The Rams have made Loyola Marymount University their training camp home for three consecutive summers now, and this year's camp ran from July 20 through August 9, with seven open practices free to the public. Traffic around the Loyola Boulevard entrance shifts for those weeks, parking gets reshuffled, and for a stretch of summer the campus fills with fans who might otherwise never have a reason to walk through Westchester at all. LMU's own campus updates noted the entrance closures and parking changes that come with hosting the team, which is worth knowing if you live nearby and haven't dealt with it before.
Add in the ongoing programming at the Loyola Village branch library on Manchester, from storytime to the community room's crafts nights, and you get a neighborhood whose rhythm doesn't actually hinge on whichever restaurant is getting attention that month.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
If you've been avoiding the Manchester strip because it used to feel like a stretch of big box stores and nothing else, that read is out of date. A few things worth doing differently this fall:
- Walk past Tomat even if you're not stopping in. The rooftop is worth seeing once, and the private event space upstairs is booking for the kind of gathering that used to mean driving to Culver City or Playa Vista.
- Keep Aliki's and Shokudo in your weeknight rotation. They've outlasted every wave of turnover on this strip for a reason, and that reason is the food, not novelty.
- If you skipped the carnival this spring, it comes back every year around the same late-May weekend. Mark it now instead of finding out after the fact.
- Expect the Rams to return to LMU next summer. Three years running is enough of a pattern that the parking changes and entrance closures are worth planning around rather than being surprised by.
Westchester's food scene isn't turning over the way a lot of coverage makes it sound. It's being unlocked, one long-held building at a time, by families who never left in the first place.
If you're weighing what a neighborhood like this actually means for a purchase or a sale, that's a longer conversation, and one worth having with someone who knows the difference between a corridor that's changing and a corridor that's finally using what it already had. Tim Meza works across the South Bay and Beach Cities and is happy to talk through what a specific block or building history actually tells you before you make a move. Schedule a consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
