Walk into the Sunday crowd at Victory and Balboa and ask a regular where they are. They will say Encino without hesitating. Pull up the same address on a business directory and it lists Van Nuys, 91406. Nobody at the market is wrong. They are just answering two different questions: one about where the produce stand sits on a map, the other about which neighborhood actually claims it.
That gap between the administrative Encino and the lived one is not a fluke limited to one Sunday market. It runs the length of Ventura Boulevard here, and once you notice it, the whole corridor starts to make more sense. Encino's identity was never drawn by zip code. It was drawn by the people who kept showing up.
Three Addresses, One Boulevard
Stand at the intersection of Ventura and Balboa and look in three directions. Each business you can see answers the "where are you" question a little differently.
| Business | Street Address | Label on Record | Brand Identity |
|---|---|---|---|
| Encino Farmers Market | 17400 Victory Blvd | Van Nuys, CA 91406 | "Encino" |
| Alfred Coffee | 16911 Ventura Blvd | Los Angeles, CA 91316 | "Alfred Coffee Encino" |
| Popular | 18047 Ventura Blvd | Encino, CA 91316 | Encino |
Popular is the only one of the three where the postal record and the brand agree. The other two carry an administrative label that has nothing to do with what regulars call the place. That inconsistency isn't a data error. It's what happens when a corridor's identity gets decided socially, one repeat visit at a time, faster than any directory can keep up.
The Corner That Actually Founded the Name
There is one point on this map where there's no ambiguity at all, and it explains why the rest of the corridor bothers claiming the name in the first place. Los Encinos State Historic Park sits at 16756 Moorpark Street, a block off the intersection of Balboa and Ventura, on five acres that have been continuously significant for longer than the street grid around them has existed.
Long before it was a park, the land held natural springs that made it one of the first inhabited sites in the San Fernando Valley, part of a Tongva village called Siutcanga, "the place of the oaks." The Spanish name that followed, Encino, is a direct translation. The park still holds the original nine-room De La Osa Adobe, built in 1849, and a reservoir shaped like a guitar that collects the same springwater that made the site worth settling in the first place.
Everything else along Ventura Boulevard is retail turnover. This corner is the reason the neighborhood has a name to fight over.
A Restaurant That Chose the Name Anyway
Popular opened at 18047 Ventura Blvd in March, the seventh concept from the Tel Aviv Restaurant Group. Chef Dor Priezler runs a seafood-forward Mediterranean menu out of a 4,000-square-foot space, with dishes like a branzino-stuffed Fish Cigar and a raw bar built around sea bream and yellowtail. None of that required the restaurant to file under Encino. The same 91316 zip code covers Alfred Coffee's address a mile east, and a restaurant group new to this stretch of the Valley had no obligation to align itself with one micro-identity over another.
They filed as Encino anyway, five months before this piece was written, which is a small but real data point about which name still carries weight when a restaurant group decides how to introduce itself to a new market.
Sunday Still Runs on Victory and Balboa Regardless of the Zip
None of the boundary confusion changes what actually happens at the market itself. The Encino Farmers Market runs year-round, every Sunday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., rain or shine, with more than 30 farmers from Central and Southern California, roughly 25 food vendors, and about 10 crafters set up on the lot. It accepts EBT and WIC, which keeps it functioning as a real grocery stop and not just a weekend attraction. A share of every dollar spent there supports ONEgeneration's senior services programs in the Valley, so the market's Sunday crowd is also, without necessarily thinking about it, funding home-delivered meals and transportation for older residents nearby.
Whether the parcel technically sits in Van Nuys or Encino has never once come up as a reason not to go. The market's own website doesn't advertise a zip code. It advertises Sundays.
Coffee Draws the Same Line Differently
Move a few blocks west and the pattern holds, but the businesses solve it in different ways. Alfred Coffee's Encino location, at 16911 Ventura Blvd, completed a redesign last year with Studio Sucio that turned the space into something closer to a reimagined 1980s mall atrium: lavender tile, a wide communal island, an open-air feel that didn't exist in the building's previous interior-facing layout. Alfred calls the location Encino on its own site. Yelp files the same address under Los Angeles.
The two Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf locations on Ventura, at 16101 and 17301-1, split the difference by orienting themselves around landmarks instead of jurisdictions. Their own copy points customers toward an Americano before Balboa Park or a cold brew after the Japanese Garden, using the corridor's actual geography rather than its postal one. That's the more honest approach, and it's the one that matches how people here actually give directions: not by zip code, but by what's nearby.
The Neighborhood Council Isn't Confused
If there were any doubt about which version of Encino residents actually organize around, the Encino Neighborhood Council settled it in May. Their first EncinoFest ran on a Sunday afternoon at Encino Park, free and open to all ages, with a main stage lineup that moved from a local dance studio's performance through interactive kids' music, a DJ playing neighborhood favorites, and a live band closing out the day. The event doubled as a chance to talk traffic concerns, meet the council's youth committee, and get face time with local officers over ice cream. None of that required a zip code check at the gate. It required a park with the right name on it.
That's the throughline across all of this. The Encino that shows up on a mailing label and the Encino that shows up on a Sunday afternoon are not always the same parcel of land, but they're increasingly the same community, built one market visit, one coffee order, and one restaurant opening at a time. The boulevard didn't wait for the map to catch up. It just kept calling itself Encino until enough people agreed.
If you're the kind of person who notices details like a farmers market's zip code not matching its name, you probably already know your way around the rest of this corridor better than most directories do. When the day comes that you want a similarly close read on what's actually happening in Encino's real estate market, not just its restaurant openings, Antonio Bruno is a call away.
