Walk into Gable on a Thursday night and the first thing you notice isn't the menu. It's the hearth. A live fire sits at the center of the dining room, ringed by dried herbs and found ceramics, throwing light across wood tabletops that used to belong to Shirley Brasserie. The space opened its doors on August 18, 2026, under the name of a man who checked into the building nearly a century ago and never really checked out.
That building is the Hollywood Roosevelt, which opened on Hollywood Boulevard in 1927 and hosted the first Academy Awards two years later. It turns 100 next year. Gable, the restaurant, is brand new. Gable, the hotel guest it's named for, arrived a lifetime before that. This is the pattern worth paying attention to this fall: almost nothing opening in Hollywood right now is a new building. It's an old one, finding a new use.
The Roosevelt's Second Act
Gable replaces Shirley Brasserie in the hotel's ground-floor space, the same room that once helped launch chef Craig Hopson's career. The new kitchen is run by culinary director Chris Flint, who came from Maude and Eleven Madison Park, working alongside chef de cuisine Will Kelly. Beverage director Chad Austin, formerly of Bar Benjamin, built the cocktail list around techniques like koji-washing and full clarification rather than straight classics.
The menu leans into Los Angeles rather than old Hollywood nostalgia. A bulgogi and kimchi pizza gets torched tableside. A dry-aged cheeseburger comes on a house-made bun. A whole grilled branzino arrives bossam-style, with lettuce cups and salsa macha on the side.
Gable, quick reference 7000 Hollywood Blvd, inside the Hollywood Roosevelt Dinner Tuesday through Thursday, 5 to 9:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 5 to 10 p.m. 82 seats, reservations recommended
The point isn't that a hotel restaurant changed hands. It's that one of Hollywood's oldest addresses just got a reason for locals, not just hotel guests, to book a table there again.
A Newspaper Building Learns to Feed People
A few blocks away, on Wilcox Avenue between Selma and Sunset, sits a two-story Art Deco building that used to print the news. The Citizen News Building went up in the early 1930s as headquarters for the Hollywood Citizen-News, which ran until the paper folded in 1970. It sat as underused event space for years before Relevant Group, the hotel developer behind the neighboring Thompson Hollywood and Tommie Hollywood, took it over. In 2018, the city designated it a Historic-Cultural Monument.
Today the ground floor holds Mother Wolf, chef Evan Funke's Roman restaurant, along with Bar Avoja and a couple of private dining rooms. The second floor, roughly 10,000 square feet with 20-foot ceilings and polished concrete underfoot, is where Mott 32 is set to land. Mott 32 is one of the most decorated Chinese restaurant groups in the world, known for Peking duck and a Hong Kong pedigree that includes a World Interior of the Year award. Hollywood will be its second U.S. location after Las Vegas.
What's notable isn't just that a fine-dining group chose Hollywood. It's that they chose a building whose bones are almost a hundred years old and are leaning into that history rather than gutting it. The lofty ceilings and industrial floors that made the space work as a newsroom are the same features making it work as a dining room now.
The Theater Gets a Bar Again
Down on Selma Avenue, the Fonda Theatre has picked up a tiki bar. Savage Seas leans fully into an old Hollywood tropical aesthetic, memorabilia and outlandish cocktails included, tucked inside a venue that's spent decades hosting live music rather than late-night drinks.
Add to that ABL, which landed on Cahuenga Boulevard this year with a menu that mixes Jamaican and Chinese cooking, jerk-dusted fried oysters and orange chicken's fragrant cousin, Chen pi ji wings. It comes from the mother-daughter team of Aja and Barbara Dawson, who run Little Tokyo's A Beautiful Life. The room glows deep red, fills fast at weekend brunch, and seats about 35.
None of these four openings, Gable, Mott 32, Savage Seas, or ABL, required a single new foundation. Every one of them moved into a building that was already doing something else. A brasserie became a live-fire dining room. A newspaper became two restaurants stacked on top of each other. A concert venue picked up a second identity after dark. That's not a coincidence of timing. It's how a neighborhood with almost no available land left to build on keeps growing anyway.
The Trail Above It Isn't Moving as Fast
If the restaurant scene is a story about old buildings getting new life, Runyon Canyon is the opposite story right now, and it's worth knowing before you plan a hike.
The park's West Ridge Trail closed after the Sunset Fire in January 2025, which burned roughly 60 acres of the Hollywood Hills above the park. A KTLA report from February 2026 described the trail as reopened, calling it "packed with hikers" the Sunday after. But that reopening notice didn't stick everywhere. As late as this spring, the city's own Recreation and Parks page for Runyon Canyon and several independent trail-tracking sites were still listing the West Trail as closed until further notice, even as trail runners posted reports that it was physically open with no tape or barriers in sight.
That gap between official signage and on-the-ground reality is common enough at Runyon that it's worth building into your plans rather than treating any single source as final. If you're headed up from the Fuller Avenue entrance or the smaller lot off Mulholland Drive this fall, check the posted signage at the gate before you commit to the full loop past Inspiration Point and Clouds Rest. The rest of the park, including the main fire road and the East Ridge Trail, hasn't had any of these closure issues.
What This Adds Up To
Hollywood isn't short on headlines about what's opening. What's easy to miss is the shape of it. A hotel that's turning 100 got its most talked-about restaurant in years. A newspaper building that stopped printing in 1970 now houses two kitchens. A concert hall added a bar. The neighborhood's newest dining rooms are consistently its oldest buildings, reused rather than replaced.
That's a useful thing to notice if you live here, because it says something about how Hollywood absorbs change. The blocks around Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset aren't being bulldozed and rebuilt. They're being reoccupied, one historic address at a time, by people betting that the building's original bones are worth keeping. If you've wondered why your neighborhood still feels recognizable even as the restaurant list keeps changing, that's the answer.
If you're weighing what any of this means for your own next move in Hollywood, whether that's buying into a building with some history behind it or figuring out the right time to sell one, DeSousa Real Estate Group is glad to talk it through. Schedule a consultation whenever you're ready.
