Restaurants in Santa Monica, CA

Across 905 places listed in this guide, Santa Monica counts 645 restaurants, 135 cafes, 81 bars, and 35 quick service spots. Coffee shops and cafes lead the category counts with 137 listings, followed by bars at 84 and American restaurants at 52. Most of the listings are restaurants.

At 99.7 places per ten thousand residents, density sits well above the 41.8 median for all cities in this guide.

672 listings are independent; the chains that show up most are Starbucks (24), Subway (9), The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf (9) and McDonald's (5).

Food in Santa Monica by cuisine

Own a restaurant in Santa Monica?

845 of the 905 places here (93%) list a website. When a guest searches for food in Santa Monica and lands on a delivery app instead of your site, the app takes a commission on the order and shows them your competitors. Servestack gives you your own ordering site with zero commission, POS sync and loyalty, and Studio makes the menus, flyers and posts to promote it. See what you would keep with the commission savings calculator, or browse the restaurant marketing guides.

Place data from the Overture Maps Foundation (overturemaps.org), which includes data from Meta, Microsoft and Foursquare, used under the CDLA Permissive 2.0 and Apache 2.0 licenses. Restaurants open, close and move; check with the restaurant before you go. Data refreshed 2026-10-11.