Why the Country's No. 2-Ranked Pizzeria Picked Palms
What made a restaurant ranked the No. 2 pizzeria in the country skip Culver City, skip Mar Vista, skip every obvious corridor on the Westside, and open its next location on a stretch of Tabor Street most Angelenos couldn't place on a map?
Pizzeria Sei spent four years working out of a Pico-Robertson storefront that could barely fit its own oven, all while chef William Joo and his wife and business partner Jennifer So built a following that regularly sold out the room and drew national attention, including praise from New York Times critic Tejal Rao for the crust's char and texture. When they finally had the standing and the reservations list to expand anywhere on the Westside, they picked a corner of Palms. That decision is worth sitting with if you already live here, because it says something the generic neighborhood roundups keep missing. Palms was never short on demand. It was short on square footage.
The new Pizzeria Sei opened June 24, 2026, at 10700 Tabor Street, at the corner of Overland Avenue, with a full sit-down dining room seating around 30 people plus a patio, a larger kitchen, and a broader wine, sake, and beer program than the original space could ever support. Reservations release on a rolling basis, so it helps to plan a week or two ahead rather than count on a walk-in table. The restaurant is open Wednesday through Sunday, 4 to 10 p.m., and the kitchen has used the extra room to add two styles beyond its signature Neapolitan base: fried montanara pizzas and thin, crackly Roman-style scrocchiarella.
None of this happened because Sei needed a bigger name. It happened because Sei landed at No. 2 on 50 Top Pizza USA's 2026 list for the second consecutive year, tied with San Francisco's Tony's Pizza Napoletana and trailing only New York's Una Pizza Napoletana, and a restaurant operating at that level eventually runs out of room to say yes to its own reservations. So and Joo didn't abandon Pico-Robertson. The original location is still open, rebranded as Sei Pizza Bar, still serving many of the same pies with dine-in, takeout, and delivery. As So put it to Eater Los Angeles, describing the two locations' different roles:
You don't compare an evolved Pokémon to the basic Pokémon.
The Palms location is the evolution. The Pico-Robertson original is still doing exactly what it always did. That's not a story about a neighborhood getting discovered. It's a story about an operator reading the numbers and picking the address that made sense.
If you're wondering why an ambitious kitchen would bet on a stretch of Palms instead of a street with more foot traffic and a bigger name, it helps to look at what was already there before Sei signed a lease. Palms has never organized itself around one flashy commercial strip the way Venice has Abbot Kinney or Santa Monica has Main Street. Instead the food scene is scattered block by block through a neighborhood of dingbat apartment buildings, and residents already know exactly which storefront to drive to for what.
Within a short distance of the new Sei location, you can find Indonesian street food at Simpang Asia, Nepali dumplings at Momo Souls, a bagel shop simply called Daniel's Bagels, and Tacos Por Vida, an operation with ties to the Kogi lineage. A few blocks further you'll find Madre for Oaxacan cooking, Lokal for banh mi, Versailles for Cuban roast chicken, Al's Hot Chicken doing a straight-faced Nashville hot chicken, and Kotoya for tonkotsu ramen. That's not a list assembled for a tourist itinerary. It's what residents already default to on a Tuesday night, spread across a neighborhood with no single anointed dining strip.
A restaurant group doing real site selection reads that kind of density as a signal, not a curiosity. It means the customer base is already trained to seek out a specific kitchen rather than settle for whatever's closest, which is exactly the kind of audience an ambitious second location needs to survive its first year.
The Motor Avenue Farmers Market runs every Sunday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., year round, at 10420 National Boulevard. Year round is the detail that matters here. A lot of farmers markets around Los Angeles run seasonally, filling in spring through fall and going dark in the winter months when the produce and the foot traffic both thin out. Palms sustains its market on a fifty-two week calendar, which is less a claim about the produce and more a claim about the neighborhood underneath it. A market that doesn't need an off-season is a market with steady, dependable local demand behind it every single week.
A few blocks from the new pizza dining room sits one of the strangest small museums in Los Angeles. The Museum of Jurassic Technology, officially addressed at 9341 Venice Boulevard, sits close enough to the Palms line that local business directories routinely tag its neighborhood as Palms rather than its Culver City mailing address. It keeps deliberately odd hours, open Thursday from 2 to 8 p.m. and Friday through Sunday from noon to 6 p.m., closed the rest of the week. Photography isn't permitted anywhere inside, visits are entirely self-guided, and the rooftop tea room serves complimentary tea and cookies to anyone who makes it to the top floor.
The museum has operated on those terms for decades without ever needing to become louder or more convenient to attract an audience. It has simply rewarded the people willing to look past a plain door and figure out what's inside. That's the same instinct that makes Palms work as a neighborhood generally. Nothing here is arranged for a passerby. Everything here is arranged for someone who already knows to look.
The Palms Neighborhood Council, certified by the city in December 2004 and now one of 99 such councils across Los Angeles, represents a neighborhood of roughly 45,000 residents packed into a footprint of about 1.95 square miles, making it one of the more densely populated pockets of the city. Palms itself dates to 1886 and became the first community to voluntarily annex into the city of Los Angeles in 1915, which means the neighborhood has been governing its own small patch of turf longer than almost anywhere else on the Westside.
That institutional memory shows up every spring at Palms Community Day, a free block party the council has run since 2017. The most recent documented edition, held in May 2025, closed a stretch of National Boulevard between Palms Boulevard and Clarington Avenue, right next to the Palms Station on the Metro E Line, for an afternoon of food trucks, a live DJ, yoga sessions, musical performances, and Ballet Folklorico presentations from students at two area public schools. Kids get a bounce house, face painting, and a reptile petting zoo. City departments and local political offices set up tables alongside vendors selling handmade jewelry and crafts. It's the kind of event that only makes sense once you understand a neighborhood has been operating on its own terms, self-organized, for well over a century.
None of these threads are unrelated. A restaurant ranked the No. 2 pizzeria in the country didn't stumble into Palms by accident. It landed on a corner already surrounded by a working international food corridor, a farmers market that never takes a season off, a museum that has quietly rewarded curiosity since long before "hidden gem" became a phrase people use in restaurant reviews, and a neighborhood council old enough to have annexed itself into the city on its own terms. The chef's calculation and the resident's daily routine are reading the same evidence. Palms was never waiting to be discovered. It was already busy feeding itself.
If you live here, none of this changes your Tuesday night plans. But it's worth knowing that the rest of Los Angeles is starting to notice what your dinner rotation already told you.
Whether you're thinking about what a Palms address is actually worth in today's market, or just curious how a neighborhood like this holds its value over time, Terry Ballentine has been reading the Westside's coastal and inland markets since long before Tabor Street had a wait list. Reach out anytime for a free home valuation. No pressure, just a straight answer from someone who's watched this market move through more than one cycle.
With more than 50 years in Westside real estate, Terry Ballentine offers unmatched expertise in Marina del Rey, Venice, and nearby coastal communities. He provides personalized guidance for buyers, sellers, and investors, earning long-term trust and repeat clients. Terry’s hands-on approach and deep local knowledge ensure every transaction is handled with care and precision.
Terry Ballentine | CA DRE# 00588883
124 Washington Blvd Marina Del Rey, CA 90292