Barely two months after pouring its first matcha latte, the team behind Dragon Alley Coffee is already moving into burgers. Dragon Alley Kitchen & Burgers is coming to 1322 3rd St. on Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade, taking over the space long occupied by Johnny Rockets, with a menu built around smash burgers, chicken burgers, milkshakes, root beer floats and breakfast options.
The burger concept comes from the same team behind Dragon Alley Coffee, according to Palisades News, which first reported the expansion. Founder Richard Chand opened Dragon Alley Coffee with partners along Santa Monica Boulevard, a roughly 1,000-square-foot cafe serving specialty drinks including a banana loaf latte and Japanese matcha. Chand announced the Kitchen & Burgers concept via social media, and as of the announcement no opening date had been set, per the same report.
Dragon Alley Coffee itself opened about a month before the burger announcement, meaning the founders moved from their first storefront to plans for a second in a matter of weeks. Chand has said opening his own business in downtown Santa Monica was his dream, and he has called the area a longtime hangout spot of his, per Mirror Media Group.
A Second-Generation Kitchen Ready to Go
The 1322-A Third Street Promenade address isn't a blank slate. It's a 6,577-square-foot second-generation restaurant space already outfitted with a Type 1 commercial exhaust hood, walk-in freezer, mop sink and grease trap, according to a LoopNet listing for the property. That kind of turnkey infrastructure can significantly lower the startup and buildout costs for an incoming tenant, which may help explain why a burger concept was a natural fit for the former Johnny Rockets footprint.
Active interior conversion construction at the address was officially logged on August 8, following Johnny Rockets' exit from the 1300 block, according to Third Street Promenade Occupancy tracking. The move fills a prominent vacancy on a stretch of the Promenade that has struggled with empty storefronts in recent years.
Filling Gaps on a Struggling Promenade
Retail vacancy along the Third Street Promenade hovered between 25% and 30% in mid-2026, with local tracking logging 27 vacant storefronts and 11 business closures over the prior 12 months, as Hoodline previously reported. City leaders have responded with a string of policy changes aimed at getting restaurants into empty spaces faster. In March, the Santa Monica City Council eliminated the city's $1,000-per-seat wastewater capacity fee for new restaurants, a change that saves a 50-seat dining establishment $50,000 in municipal fees, per the City of Santa Monica.
Santa Monica also repealed longstanding formula retail rules in August 2025 that had restricted chain restaurants with more than 150 domestic locations, according to The Registry Southern California Real Estate News. That deregulation has already opened the door to national quick-service brands such as Raising Cane's at 1401 3rd Street and Taco Bell Cantina at 318 Santa Monica Boulevard, putting independent concepts like Dragon Alley on the same stretch as much larger chains.
National Ambitions From a Local Team
Before Dragon Alley Coffee even opened to the public, Chand described the Santa Monica Boulevard location as a flagship store for a national growth plan targeting roughly two new locations per year, according to What Now Los Angeles. Dragon Alley Coffee was created by a team of accounting colleagues — Santa Monica residents Richard and Sage Chand alongside partners Victor Garcia, Jostin Moller and Fernando Garcia — who spent six months developing the concept before its June ribbon-cutting, per the Santa Monica Daily Press. That flagship cafe held its official opening on June 17 at 312 Santa Monica Boulevard, a 1,000-square-foot space known for lidless cups, dragon symbolism and specialty lattes.
The city has also been layering in other changes meant to draw foot traffic downtown, including an expanded outdoor entertainment zone approved in April that lets visitors carry open alcoholic beverages across the entire downtown area during designated events, according to CBS LA. Construction also began this month on the first of up to 16 proposed digital billboards along the Promenade, part of a broader visual overhaul of the corridor, per Patch. Exact opening dates and buildout costs for Dragon Alley Kitchen & Burgers remain unclear, and how the local brand will fare alongside incoming national chains is still an open question.
