Marrying Food and Entrepreneurism in the Pico Neighborhood - the Virginia Avenue Park Commercial Kitchen




Virginia Avenue Park (VAP), nestled within the City’s most ethnically and culturally diverse neighborhood, is a community hub that offers a wide variety of educational, cultural, and virtual programs and events to youth and their families in the Pico Neighborhood.  

The Pico Neighborhood was greatly impacted by the  COVID-19 pandemic.  VAP was quick to respond and partnered with the Westside Food Bank to become an emergency food pantry site to address issues of food insecurity in Santa Monica. It also provided safe assistance to support applicants of the City’s Emergency Covid-19 Rental Assistance Program. Many of those living in the Pico community work in the food service industry which has been hardest hit by the by the pandemic and the economic crisis country-wide.  And many are looking for ways that they can start their own businesses to survive.  

Community-based kitchens function as public food preparation sites where individuals can gather and cook meals for themselves, their families, and the greater community. They promote community connectedness, partnership, culture, and entrepreneurship. Additionally, these kitchens generate economic growth in local neighborhoods in the form of small business incubation and development, and job-training sites. The goal is utilize the VAP Kitchen as an economic driver in the Pico Neighborhood giving local residents access to a licensed commercial kitchen where they can prepare food for wholesale and retail sales, participate as  official food vendors to cater small and larger City sponsored events as well as other public and private events. 

The conversation to build a community-led  commercial kitchen at VAP  is not a new one. It was first recommended before the pandemic by VAP parent groups, Familias Latinas Unidas and Parent Connection Group, and other neighborhood residents. In 2019, the City Council proposed a comprehensive economic development program declaring “incubating small businesses and entrepreneurs” as one of the plan’s five priorities. The resulting Pico Wellbeing Project identified business incubator programs and a community-led commercial kitchen at Virginia Avenue Park as a top priority for creating pathways to entrepreneurship.  

Using the initial design prepared by a local professional kitchen designer, the City’s Architectural Services team has engaged Koning Eizenberg to design the Virginia Avenue Park kitchen into a full-service commercial kitchen to include two work areas (full kitchen and two prep areas) along with ample storage space. The VAP Kitchen converts an existing City-owned facility into to a fully licensed commercial kitchen that will offer kitchen rentals for local food businesses and small business incubator services to provide entrepreneurship education for members. The model will provide a combination of reduced rate and market rate rentals for a prep station and/or the full kitchen for members. 

Now more than ever is the time to come together to support resilient and inspired residents seeking pathways to entrepreneurship, skill development, and economic stability. The City’s COVID-19 Economic Recovery Task Force has provided $100,000 as seed funding towards the commercial kitchen. The City has begun the process of soliciting funding support from charitable foundations and is also seeking proposals from qualified commercial kitchen operators to make this initiative a reality.


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Starting in Fall 2020, staff and community advocate and entrepreneur, Kathleen Benjamin  have been engaging the community through the webinar series, Calling All Chefs. The series has brought together local chefs and restaurant owners to share their entrepreneurial journey with aspiring chefs. Ranging from Santa Monica’s Josh Loeb of Rustic Canyon Group to Cary Earle of Earle’s Grill to Jose Carvajal of Café Bolivar, participants learned about what it takes to start and grow a food business.  Over the seven-week series, dozens of attendees were inspired and were able to ask questions of these local business owners who generously donated their time despite the challenges the restauranteurs were facing due to the pandemic. 

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