Start from 28 curated places around Santa Monica, CA, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
Rustic Canyon
The restaurant that anchored the Wilshire Corridor's food scene with California-grown seriousness — the seasonal menu draws from relationships with regional farms and ranches, and the wine list's focus on small producers and natural wines was ahead of the LA curve. The kitchen applies real technique to excellent ingredients without performing either, and the room feels like a neighborhood restaurant despite the caliber of food.
Bay Cities Italian Deli
The Godmother sandwich is one of Los Angeles's canonical foods — imported Italian meats, provolone, and a precise application of peperoncini and the house 'dressing' on a perfect roll, assembled at a counter that has been producing this sandwich since 1925. Not a restaurant, not Instagram-worthy — just the best Italian sandwich in Southern California, period.
Trails & outdoors
Pier to Venice Beach Boardwalk Walk
The 2-mile walk from Santa Monica Pier south to Venice Beach is California beach culture in concentrated form — the paved promenade passes Muscle Beach, the Venice Skate Park, the basketball courts made famous by White Men Can't Jump, and the permanent outdoor gallery of Venice's street artists. No natural scenery to speak of, but as a human spectacle it's unequaled on the West Coast.
Temescal Canyon Trail — Pacific Palisades
A 4-mile loop in the Pacific Palisades that climbs from a canyon trailhead up to ridgeline views over the Pacific and the LA basin — a genuine mountain hike 15 minutes from the Santa Monica Pier. The canyon section through native chaparral and oak woodland transitions to exposed ridge with views that take in Catalina Island, Malibu, and the Santa Monica Mountains.
Things to do
Santa Monica Pier — Pacific Park
Pacific Park on the Santa Monica Pier is the only amusement park on a pier in California, and the solar-powered Ferris wheel — 130 feet above the Pacific, lit in programmable LED patterns at night — is the element that's earned it an actual place in LA's visual vocabulary. Come at dusk when the wheel begins to glow and the pier transforms.
The Broad (free, reservation required)
The contemporary art museum on Grand Avenue downtown holds some of the finest works from the Broad collection — Basquiat, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami — in a building whose honeycomb veil facade is itself a contemporary architecture landmark. Entry is free with timed reservations, and the permanent collection alone justifies the drive from Santa Monica.
Landmarks & sights
Santa Monica Pier
The terminus of Route 66 and the most recognizable sight in Santa Monica, the pier has been a working pleasure pier since 1909. The Pacific Park amusement park occupies the outer deck with a solar-powered Ferris wheel that lights up the coastline at night; the inner pier has bait shops, seafood restaurants, and an aquarium underneath the wooden deck. Neither tourist trap nor locals' secret — just an honest California landmark.
Palisades Park
The long blufftop park running along the ocean-facing edge of the Santa Monica palisades offers uninterrupted Pacific views from 100 feet above the beach. The 1.5-mile cliff-edge path is one of LA's finest morning walks — pelicans patrol the coastal air below, the Santa Monica Bay spreads south to the Palos Verdes Peninsula, and on clear days the Channel Islands are visible.