A Westchester Sunday: How 87th Street, The Bluffs, And Tomat's Rooftop Fit Into One Walkable Loop

Most Sunday guides to Los Angeles treat Westchester as an approach pattern. You fly over it, you fill up on the way to LAX, you keep driving. That framing misses what the people who live here already know: the neighborhood has quietly assembled a Sunday sequence that runs on foot between three fixed points, and the distance between them is smaller than most Westside residents realize.

This is not a case for moving here. It is a case for how a resident's Sunday actually unfolds in 2026, and why a farmers market that started in 2017, a Michelin-recognized restaurant that opened during the pandemic construction slog, and a bluff-side trail network with 125 feet of elevation gain have started to behave like one continuous room.

The thesis, before the itinerary

Westchester's Sunday works because three anchors sit inside a tight geographic triangle, and each one leans on the other two for its programming. The 87th Street farmers market feeds the restaurant on the same block. The restaurant's rooftop looks toward the runway that gives the neighborhood its odd, planes-overhead intimacy. The bluff behind Loyola Marymount, ten minutes away, gives residents the vertical break that a flat coastal grid otherwise denies them. Pull one anchor and the sequence collapses. Keep them together and the neighborhood reads less like a commuter shelf and more like a small town that happens to share a fence line with the second-busiest airport in the country.

9 a.m., 87th Street becomes a room

The Westchester Farmers' Market is held every Sunday in the heart of downtown Westchester on 87th Street from 9-1pm, and it is founded and presented by Westchester Town Center Business Improvement District rather than by a private operator. That matters for two reasons. The BID has been building the block for years, and the market itself has been sponsored since its founding by Karen Dial and the Drollinger Family Charitable Foundation, whose fingerprints on the local commercial corridor run deep.

What you get on the ground is a market that behaves like community infrastructure, not a weekend pop-up. The market accepts EBT benefits and has a fully funded market match program to match a recipient's EBT benefits up to an additional $15 free dollars to spend on produce; swing by the market's info booth to learn more and to redeem your EBT/Market Match benefits. Canned-goods donations at the info booth go to the LAX Food Pantry.

The address on 87th is the key. Everything else on the itinerary sits within a short walk of it, which is why locals rarely move their car between stops.

10:30 a.m., the bluff walk locals actually take

Ten minutes east, the neighborhood tilts. The Westchester Bluffs are the reason the LMU campus sits above the wetlands, and they are the reason a flat coastal grid gets a genuine ridge walk. Residents pick between three trails, and the choice tells you something about the walker.

The LMU Trail is the one most locals mean when they say "the bluff." It starts at Court Park, on the southwest side of the corner of Bluff Creek Drive and Centinela Avenue and runs southwest to Lincoln. Halfway along, you look down at a piece of aviation history that most residents forget is there. The trail passes large hangars that were part of the historic Hughes Airport, built to hold Howard Hughes's Spruce Goose; the hangar has been converted into a film studio, and much of Avatar was filmed at the Raleigh Studios in the Howard Hughes-Hercules Complex.

If you want something shorter, Bluff Trail Park at One Westbluff offers a paved overlook of the Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve. The wetlands themselves are one of the last of their kind. The Ballona Riparian Corridor sits on approximately 25 acres, a 2 mile long stretch of riparian habitat that connects to the Ballona Freshwater Marsh, directly below the Westchester Bluffs and next to Playa Vista, and with 95% of historic wetland and riparian habitat lost, this section of restored habitat has become a vital part of sustaining populations of rare and sensitive species in the area. Note that the Cabora Drive Trail is closed until further notice due to a landslide, so plan the loop around the upper path.

Noon, back to 87th Street for the anchor that changed the block

The building that made the difference sits at 6261 W 87th St. Tomat, opened by Harry Posner and Natalie Dial, has done something that a farmers market alone could not: it gave the corridor a reason to fill up after dark, and it gave Sunday brunch a destination that locals no longer have to drive to Culver City for.

The Michelin Guide picked it up. Tomat is the London-inspired, LAX-adjacent Westchester restaurant owned by husband and wife duo Harry Posner and Natalie Dial. Their menu features coffee and pastries during the day but later turns up the heat for dining. The chef pedigree explains the ambition. Posner cooked at The Clove Club in London, an acclaimed Michelin-starred kitchen, and at the now-closed Inua in Tokyo, an experimental fermentation-forward offshoot of Noma.

The family history is the part that reads local. Dial's roots on this block go back four generations:

"My family has a long history in Westchester, like back to the 1940s. My great-grandmother bought one of the first big grocery stores in Westchester called Jim Dandy, back when there were still bean fields. And then my grandparents lived here. My parents both grew up here, although I grew up in Montana, and now we live here. This has always felt like home to me."

That framing is why the restaurant does not feel imposed on the neighborhood. It feels like a return. Posner puts it directly: "There really hasn't been a high-end, finer dining experience in Westchester so we wanted to set the tone. That means being really welcoming instead of, you know, intimidating."

The menu draws from what you saw at 87th Street an hour earlier. Working with local farmers and suppliers to highlight seasonality along with California's bounty, Tomat features all-day dining, but it's in the evenings when the cooking turns more serious. A dinner check runs about $85 per person before tax and tip with cocktails, which puts it below the West LA and Santa Monica peer set for comparable ambition.

Late afternoon, the rooftop and the planes

The rooftop is the part that a first-time visitor misses. The rooftop is now open, with a schedule posted each Sunday for the following week, and it functions as a second venue with its own programming. Guests can enjoy live jazz sessions, trivia nights, and televised sporting events on the airy rooftop terrace; the venue frequently hosts unique culinary collaborations, guest chef pop-ups, and intimate themed gatherings.

The view is the giveaway that you are still in Westchester. You can start the day with coffee and a pastry or get a little dressed up at night for a date night and go up to the rooftop and watch the planes take off at LAX. No other rooftop on the Westside offers that exact orientation.

The through-line, and why it holds

Three anchors on their own would not add up to a Sunday. Placed the way they are, they do. The market on 87th feeds the restaurant on 87th. The restaurant looks toward the runway that defines the neighborhood's soundscape. The bluff behind LMU sits ten minutes away and gives residents the vertical relief that a flat coastal grid otherwise denies them.

You can see the pattern in what people fold in around the edges. The Sunday routine expands to include Playa Del Rey Beach, a quieter coastal experience compared to Santa Monica or Venice, where the wide shoreline is great for long walks, beach volleyball, or catching a sunset, and it contracts to a walk with the dog at Westchester Park or Carl Nielsen Youth Park for playgrounds, sports fields, and open green areas for everyday recreation. For a slow afternoon, the Westchester Golf Course provides an approachable 18-hole, par-64 layout. The older restaurant map still holds too, with names locals rotate through week to week: In-N-Out, Truxton's, Pann's, Ayara Thai, Alejo's, Westchester Bakery.

What is new is the density of the triangle in the middle. That density is a recent development, and it is the reason Westchester in 2026 reads differently from Westchester in 2019. The neighborhood has always had good bones. It now has a Sunday it can walk.

When it is time to talk about the house itself

If your Sunday is starting to feel less like a routine and more like a reason to stay, or to trade up within the same zip code, the conversation about the property comes next. Stacy Young has spent three decades working the Westside on both sides of a transaction, and Westchester is one of the corridors she knows block by block. Request Your Free Home Valuation to see where your address sits in the current market.