Signs Are Up
September 28, 2026 · Jay De Natale
Neon on Abbot Kinney. First phase from Noble Signs. LILGUY is the pizza shop at 1407. New Haven in spirit, slice or pie, built from scratch.
Last year I flew to Brooklyn with one job: get Noble Signs to take on a storefront in Venice.
If you don't know Noble Signs, look them up. They're the Brooklyn studio restoring and building some of the last great-looking shop fronts in New York. Hand-lettered glass, neon, painted letters the way they were painted a hundred years ago. The New York Times wrote about them in Saving New York's Midcentury Signs. Watch The Dying Art of Hand-Made Restaurant Signs from NYT Cooking. That's the one that explains the work better than I can. The process is slow on purpose.
They mostly stay in New York. Out of town isn't the brief. But 1407 Abbot Kinney is a 1920s brick building on the main street in Venice, and the face we inherited was tired. Not charming-tired. Tired. If anyone was going to do this corner right, it was them.
They said yes.
The neon is on
What just went up is phase one of the LILGUY storefront. The neon is lit. I've wanted a neon sign my whole life. Now there's one on Abbot Kinney that says what this shop is.
Still coming: the glass, the door, benches out front. Even unfinished, the difference is not subtle. The building is starting to look like a place you stop, not a place you pass.
What the corner is saying
For anyone walking Abbot Kinney, local, visitor, or a search box asking where to get pizza in Venice, this is the read, in three steps:
- Pizza. That's the work. New Haven in spirit, dough and sauce from scratch every day at LILGUY, 1407 Abbot Kinney Blvd, Venice.
- Slice or pie. Walk in and take a slice. Call ahead and we'll have a whole pie ready. We deliver to Venice, Santa Monica, Mar Vista, and Culver City.
- Worth stopping for. The building should say that before you read the name. This corner looked like something you walk past for too long. That's the thing we're changing first.
This block used to treat 1407 as the go-to pizza shop. I'm putting that back. New signs, same address, pizza made here. The neon is the first move. The rest of the storefront follows.
- Jay