For years an Encino Sunday ran west-to-east along Ventura Boulevard. Coffee near Balboa, a walk past Los Encinos State Historic Park, lunch somewhere between Hayvenhurst and Woodley, done. In 2026 the axis has rotated. The morning belongs to Victory Boulevard now, the mid-day to the Basin, and Ventura only gets the reservation.
Two changes drove it. Popular opened in March at 18047 Ventura Blvd and gave the eastern end of the boulevard a real dinner anchor. And the ONEgeneration Farmers Market on Victory, always the loyalists' spot, has quietly become the default for people who used to drift into Ventura at 10 a.m. and hope for a table. The market opens at 8; the dinner rooms don't open until 5. That gap is the new shape of the day.
The east-west swap, in one morning
The old routine put you on Ventura before the boulevard was really awake. You'd end up at a counter you didn't love because the one you did love had a wait. The 2026 fix is to start north of the 101 instead of parallel to it. The ONEgeneration market at 17400 Victory Blvd runs Sundays 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., rain or shine, year-round, with more than 30 farmers and 25 food vendors on the lot.
That is a much bigger operation than the Saturday street food market that sits on Ventura itself at 16206. The Victory market has a fishmonger, prepared-food stalls, EBT and WIC access at the back gate, and a portion of every dollar spent on the lot funds ONEgeneration's senior programs. It functions less like a farmers market and more like a Sunday town square that happens to sell produce.
Why the market is the anchor everything else routes around
Nothing else in Encino has this combination of scale, hours, and reliability on a Sunday morning. Once you accept the market as the anchor, the rest of the day organizes itself around it.
- Coffee and prepared food on-site: coffee, tea, fruit smoothies, gourmet tamales, vegan options, two bakeries, and a fish monger, according to the market's operator.
- Seasonal produce that actually rotates: stone fruit, figs, melons, and summer squash right now; pomegranates, persimmons, and winter squash by late fall.
- Parking that works: a real lot behind the ONEgeneration campus, free, with two gates.
- A donation model built in: every purchase supports senior services in the neighborhood, which turns the grocery run into something a resident can feel good about repeating.
The Ventura Boulevard street-food version on Saturdays is fun and it belongs on your list, but it is a market of a different kind and a different scale. The Sunday market is the one that determines the shape of the day.
A Heritage Days detour that only works on the third Saturday
The historically-minded piece of an Encino weekend is Los Encinos State Historic Park at 16756 Moorpark Street, one block off Ventura at Balboa. The park sits on the site of the village of Siutcanga, home to Chumash, Tongva, and Tataviam people, and contains the eight-room de la Osa Adobe, the two-story Garnier building, a blacksmith shop, a natural spring, and a duck pond.
The reason to time it precisely: the park's Heritage Days programming runs 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. on confirmed 2026 dates of August 16, September 20, October 18, November 22, and December 20, per California State Parks. There is no on-site lot; parking is on Moorpark. If your Sunday lines up with the Saturday before one of those dates, you can pair the market with a Heritage Days visit and lose nothing. If it doesn't, the park is still open for a quiet stroll and duck feeding from the coin-operated dispensers the park uses in place of bread, which the geese can't properly digest.
The Basin loop, and the clock the Olympics just started
The mid-day handoff from the market is the Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Reserve, which shares Encino's southeast quadrant. The 225-acre reserve inside the roughly 2,000-acre basin has a 2.6-mile loop that connects an 11-acre lake, a bird refuge island, Haskell Creek, and a stretch of the L.A. River, with more than 200 bird species logged over the years and heavy migration traffic in fall and spring along the Pacific Flyway.
What has changed in 2026 is not the trail. It is what is coming next to it.
During the 2028 Summer Olympics, the area around the dam will host basketball (3x3), BMX racing/BMX freestyle, modern pentathlon, and skateboarding.
That is a meaningful piece of information for a current resident, because it starts a two-year window in which access, parking patterns, and construction staging around Woodley Avenue and Burbank Boulevard will get progressively more complicated. The Sunday reserve loop is not going anywhere, but the calm mornings walking it are on a countdown. Residents who like the loop as it currently reads should treat this fall and next spring as the best remaining windows before Olympics staging enters the picture.
The reserve is a dogs-off site, which is a rule people miss. If your Sunday needs a dog, the Woodley Park side of the basin or the L.A. River path outside the reserve boundary is the version to run.
Dinner has a new center of gravity on Ventura
The evening pivot back to Ventura is where 2026 actually reads differently from 2024. Popular opened in March at 18047 Ventura Blvd, the seventh concept from the Tel Aviv Restaurant Group, in a roughly 4,000-square-foot room with a bar for eight and a patio, per the operator. The kitchen is run by Executive Chef Dor Priezler and the menu is Mediterranean fusion built around seafood, with dishes like a branzino fish cigar with sumac yogurt and a savory-cheese baklava on the starter list.
Two things about this matter for a resident. First, the eastern end of Ventura in Encino has been thin on rooms that treat dinner as an occasion rather than a stop, and Popular gives that stretch a name that is not a national chain. Second, the operator has locations elsewhere in the region, which usually means the reservation book fills faster than a local one-off would. The Sunday move is to book before you leave the house, not after the Basin loop.
Adjacent to that shift, ONEgeneration's own Encino Food & Wine Festival took place April 25 on the market lawn at 17400 Victory, a 21-and-over fundraiser sampling local wines, breweries, and restaurants. The event benefits the same nonprofit that runs the Sunday market, so if you want to see where the market's operator wants the neighborhood's food scene to go, that event is the annual signal.
How a resident might string it together
For anyone who has lived in Encino for a while and wants a version of Sunday updated for what's new this year, the cleanest sequence is short and specific:
- 8:30 to 10:30 a.m.: ONEgeneration Farmers Market at 17400 Victory. Coffee and something warm on the lawn, produce for the week, back to the car by 10:45.
- 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.: Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Reserve loop from the Woodley Avenue trailhead. Binoculars if you own them. Skip if it is above 85 degrees; the reserve has almost no shade.
- 1 to 3 p.m. (third Saturdays through December, otherwise a quiet walkthrough): Los Encinos State Historic Park at 16756 Moorpark. Duck pond, Adobe, Garnier building.
- 6:30 or 7 p.m.: Dinner at Popular, 18047 Ventura, booked earlier in the week.
That is the version of an Encino Sunday that uses what is new without pretending the neighborhood has been rebuilt. The market and the park and the reserve have been here. Popular is the piece that finally makes the evening as strong as the morning, and the 2028 Olympic staging around the dam is the reason not to postpone the Basin loops that made this stretch of the Valley worth staying in in the first place.
If you have been in the neighborhood long enough to remember when the Sunday routine ran the other direction, this is the season to reset it. And when the day-to-day of Encino starts to shape a bigger question about staying, right-sizing, or moving elsewhere in the Valley, the team at Shalaya Shipman is glad to talk through what the current market actually rewards. Get your free home valuation when the timing is right.
