On a weeknight around 6:30, the nine bays at The City Golf on Ventura Boulevard are usually full of people who came by themselves. Someone works through a bucket of wedges. Someone else watches their own swing back on the monitor, then watches it again. Nobody at 15250 Ventura is ordering a drink, because there is nothing to order. A block away, on the same stretch of the boulevard, a very different kind of golf is being built from the ground up, one where the swing is almost beside the point.
That contrast is the actual story. Sherman Oaks isn't just adding a second golf simulator business. It's adding one built on the opposite theory of why anyone walks into a golf simulator in the first place, and the fact that both can exist a few hundred feet apart says something specific about what this stretch of Ventura can now support on an ordinary Tuesday.
The City Golf Sells Reps, Not a Night Out
The City Golf has been running at 15250 Ventura Boulevard long enough that it's now the model the company scaled from. It started here and in Koreatown, and has since added a third location in West L.A., which means Sherman Oaks was one of the two places that proved the concept worked before the company expanded further.
The pitch is entirely about data. Nine hitting bays run on Foresight's GCQuad and Falcon launch monitors, the same quadrascopic camera systems used to track PGA-level ball flight, alongside a TourPutt system that breaks down putting stroke patterns. There's a fitting center on site led by Steve Lee, who has 17 years of fitting experience and 25 years of teaching, has been named a Golf Digest Top 100 Club Fitter, and currently fits PGA and LPGA Tour players. That's a serious amount of instruction infrastructure sitting inside a Sherman Oaks storefront.
What's missing is just as telling. There's no food menu, no bar, no leagues, no event hosting, and you're expected to bring your own clubs. A half hour runs $20, a full hour $35, and regulars can step up to a monthly package starting at $525. One customer, describing what it's like to watch your own mechanics on video for the first time, told the site's owner, a self-taught golfer, that he "didn't know my swing looked like that. It's so ugly." That's the whole experience in one sentence. You come to find out something uncomfortable about your swing, fix it, and leave.
Down the Block, Hapa Haus Is Building the Opposite Bet
A few hundred feet west, at the Sherman Oaks Galleria address of 15301 West Ventura Boulevard, owner Alex Miyawaki is working toward a very different kind of golf simulator, one he's targeting to open in November 2026. Miyawaki got into golf during the COVID-19 pandemic, discovered the golf simulator bar format, and decided Los Angeles needed a version of his own.
The scale tells you this isn't a side addition to an existing business. Plans filed with the Los Angeles City Planning department put the footprint at 7,983 square feet, with 69 indoor seats and another 48 on a covered patio measuring 1,526 square feet. That's 117 total seats built around five golf simulators and a Hawaiian-leaning menu, with a full bar attached. As of an April 2026 report, the concept was still in early development, so some details could shift before opening, but the shape of the business is already clear from the filing: this is a full restaurant with a bar program, not a kiosk with a screen.
The Two Side by Side
| The City Golf | Hapa Haus | |
|---|---|---|
| Address | 15250 Ventura Blvd | 15301 W. Ventura Blvd, Sherman Oaks Galleria |
| Status as of August 2026 | Open | Targeting a November 2026 opening |
| Simulator bays | 9 | 5 |
| Seating | None beyond the bays | 69 indoor, 48 on a covered patio |
| Food and bar | None | Full Hawaiian-leaning menu and bar |
| Built around | Swing data, coaching, club fitting | A full evening with a group |
| Bring your own clubs | Required | Not specified |
Why the Same Stretch of Ventura Can Hold Both
This isn't happening in isolation. On the very same block, at 15300 Ventura Boulevard, Yama Sushi Marketplace is building a 7,200-square-foot location it's targeting for a late summer 2026 opening, with plans to add a full liquor license so it can pour sake, beer, and Japanese whiskey alongside its grab-and-go sushi counter. Yama's CEO, Scott Kohno, has called this stretch of the boulevard "ground zero for sushi in Los Angeles," and the new location is being built with a bigger kitchen than any of the brand's existing stores in West L.A., Koreatown, or San Gabriel.
So within roughly one block of Ventura, three separate operators are independently placing sizable bets: a practice facility with zero food service, a restaurant-bar built around golf, and a sushi market with a full bar. None of them are copying each other. They're each reading the same short stretch of sidewalk and seeing a different unmet need.
That's the part worth sitting with if you live here. The City Golf and Hapa Haus aren't going to compete for the same customer on the same night, because they're not solving the same problem. One is for the version of you that wants forty-five minutes alone with a launch monitor before you go home and cook dinner. The other, once it opens, is for the version of you that wants to sit outside with three friends for two hours and would rather not think about your ball flight at all. Hapa Haus is also landing inside an existing shopping center with its own daily foot traffic, while The City Golf built its own reason to stop the car from a plain storefront with no built-in audience. That's a meaningfully different bet on how a business earns a visit.
What Actually Changes for Someone Who Lives Here
Right now, if hitting balls after work sounds appealing, there's one real option on this stretch of Ventura, and it's a quiet one. You book a bay, work through your bucket, check your numbers on the monitor, and leave. Nobody's lingering.
Come November 2026, assuming Hapa Haus opens on schedule, this same short run of Ventura offers a second, very different way to spend that same kind of evening. You don't need to care about your handicap to go. You can show up with a group, order off a Hawaiian-leaning menu, and treat the simulator as something to do between rounds of drinks rather than the reason you came. That's a genuinely new category for this part of the boulevard, not a copy of what The City Golf already does well.
Watching how a specific block absorbs this much new investment in such a short window, a practice facility, a restaurant-bar, and a sushi market all within a few hundred feet of each other, is exactly the kind of on-the-ground detail that tells you more about a neighborhood's momentum than a single opening ever could. It's the sort of pattern Denise Marks Group tracks closely across Sherman Oaks and the rest of the San Fernando Valley, not because every new restaurant or simulator bay changes anything on its own, but because enough of them landing on the same stretch at the same time usually isn't a coincidence.
If you're curious what any of this means for a specific street or property nearby, request your free home valuation and we'll walk you through it.
