Truly Pizza Is Bringing Its Micro-Blistered Crust to Abbot Kinney

Three days of fermentation, a world-champion pizzaiolo, and the biggest new dining room on the boulevard.

Truly Pizza is opening its third location at 1239 Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice in late 2026, taking a 4,655 square foot space that seats roughly 130 across indoor and outdoor areas. That scale makes it one of the larger sit-down operations on a corridor built mostly on small storefronts.

The address has history. The space was Greenleaf Kitchen and Cocktails for about nine years. Co-founder Donna Baldwin has said the team looks for neighborhoods where people naturally gather, and that Greenleaf's decade as a local staple was part of what made the site feel like a fit.

What micro-blistering actually means

The signature is a 12-inch hearth-baked round and an airy square built on a three-day fermented dough. Co-founder John Arena has described months of testing across dough formulas, fermentation times, flour combinations and oven temperatures before landing on what the team calls micro-blistering: the small char points that form across the crust when slow-developed bubbles hit high heat. It is the difference between a crust that chars in patches and one that speckles evenly, and it only comes from a long ferment.

Arena is worth knowing about. He is a Las Vegas hospitality veteran and world-champion pizzaiolo who moved west in 1980 and built a career on a family pizzeria tradition tracing back to New York. Founding pizzaiolo Chris Decker worked alongside him for nearly 30 years, starting as a college-freshman busboy, and pizzaiolo Michael Vakneen rounds out the team.

The menu

Pies run from a $19 classic cheese to a $30 Suprema loaded with pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms and roasted peppers, in both 12-inch round and square grandma-style formats. Starters include garlic pull-apart bread and harissa-honey wings. There are focaccia sandwiches with mortadella or Calabrian-spiced Italian meats, seasonal salads, and house-made soft serve finished with toppings including olive oil and sea salt.

The company describes the Venice room as an urban neighborhood piazza, carrying over the greenery-forward, garden-style design that defined the Dana Point original.

The expansion

Truly opened in Dana Point in 2023 and added a second location at 320 North Coast Highway in Laguna Beach on May 7, 2026, next to Urth Caffe on the main stretch through downtown. Baldwin has framed the strategy plainly, saying beach communities have an energy that cannot be replicated and that the brand expands where its operating values align rather than wherever the next site happens to be. Dana Point, Laguna Beach and Venice share a similar audience and daypart profile, which is the logic behind all three.

Visiting

Truly Pizza Venice will be at 1239 Abbot Kinney Boulevard, Venice, CA 90291.

• Opening: targeted for late 2026. No firm date has been announced.

• Size: 4,655 square feet, roughly 130 seats indoors and outdoors.

• Format: full service, with walk-ins welcomed at the original locations.

• Parking: metered street parking along Abbot Kinney and the residential side streets.

Menus and updates are at trulypizza.com.

It arrives on a street that has been filling in fast. The Tasting Kitchen reopened in July, Badmaash opened its Venice room in March, and San Damian is a few blocks away. Our Venice coverage is in LA restaurant news, and the full list is in our guide to new restaurants in Los Angeles.