Fashion Island

Fashion Island is an outdoor shopping mall that behaves like a private coastal resort. You arrive, strip off the LA traffic haze, and the ocean wind rearranges your hair while manicured palms sway above wide paved promenades. The place smells faintly of roasted coffee and briny air. Walk past a koi pond, past Neiman Marcus windows, then sidle into a restaurant patio for a citrusy seasonal bowl at True Food Kitchen as gulls wheel offshore. There is a little theater for late-night films and a cinematic sweep from the second-floor terraces where you can actually see the Pacific. Shoppers here are deliberate, not frantic; dogs on leashes snooze under café tables. It looks expensive because it is, but it is also tidy and honest about its pleasures. At dusk the fountain lights come up and the palm trunks go gold.