Allen Sanford

Living the BeachLife is as much about good music and good food as it is about good friends and preserving the culture of the South Bay. Just ask Allen Sanford. The creator behind the wildly successful BeachLife Festival, well-known restaurateur, and Palos Verdes native has embodied the BeachLife lifestyle he created and he is expanding the concept and inviting the whole community to join him.
We chatted in the glorious sunshine with the highly driven low-key Sanford on the lawn of the old Malaga Cove Middle school where he was once a student. With an impeccable eye for detail, Sanford has set the stage for a new historic South Bay music experience that is appropriate for people of all ages.
His casual laid back vibe may be just a guise for the intelligent, thoughtful entrepreneur who is committed to growing and sharing his BeachLife approach to living.
When Saint Rocke opened its doors in 2008, it immediately set the bar for live music in the South Bay. Two years later Sanford took the reins of the Hermosa Beach Summer Concert Series where he would lead the community event for a decade.
Sanford’s restaurateur fingerprints have touched many beach city restaurants through the years, including three iterations of The Rockefeller, the old Union Cattle Company, Primo Italia, Saint Rocke, and others but the BeachLife festival is different. It’s a labor of love and has become a lifestyle. The idea for the BeachLife festival was not just to feature bands. Sanford was creating a blueprint for an unforgettable experience. “I am born & bred in the South Bay. The desire to do a festival began a long time ago. Festivals can break bands and bring the hottest music to you, but I wanted to put this little formula together where at the end of the formula, you’re euphoric. You’re with your friends in the sunshine, on the beach, it’s ok to eat and drink and music is an essential part of it to me. It’s got its place in that recipe, a big place.”
Sanford says the idea is that BeachLife is for everybody and everybody has their own way of doing it.

“My way of doing BeachLife is surfing and hanging out on the beach with my wife and daughter. But whether you are a sailor, surfer, skater, or volleyball player, it’s all the same. It’s all BeachLife, and all that matters is the feeling you get when you’re with your friends or your family doing your thing. That’s what we’re about, we care about the experience. That’s the culture we want to nurture and I like to try to perfect the experience. This can be dangerous sometimes because you can ruin it by trying to perfect it, and you can definitely ruin it by making a business out of it,” he says laughing. “But I find a lot of joy in watching people have fun.”
In his younger years and the early days of his restaurant career, Sanford was all about the fun himself. Without any experience, he jumped into bar and restaurant management, feet first. He met a bar owner whose establishment was not performing at its peak. Sanford offered to work for free for three months.
“My Dad always instilled in me that you prove your worth first, so I told the business owner that if he thought I was doing a bad job, I’d leave. No harm, no foul. So long story short, we became friends and partners. A few years later, the bar ended up becoming quite popular, but all I really did was call all my friends and say hey, I got the keys to a bar. Come down and party…it was madness. I often didn’t go to bed before five o’clock in the morning. I’d wake up at three o’clock in the afternoon and go back to work. We had a place in Hermosa and everybody would come back after the bars closed and it was just fun. At an early age, I learned how to balance having fun while working hard.” At 26 he opened Union Car Company with his brother and childhood friends, his first official restaurant.“Then we built another Union Cattle in Pasadena. We did Saint Rocke because I missed music in the South Bay, which was my first big dive into music and that was received really well. So all of that continued until I hit my thirties. Around age thirty-three, I knew I’d had a good decade of fun, and then it started to weigh in on me that I pretty much maxed out the fun and self-focus. It had been a great experience, but I knew, I just couldn’t see myself doing this for the next 30 years,” he remembers. During this time, Sanford fell in love with and married his longtime friend Colleen. Today they enjoy life in the South Bay with their three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Annika. A private man who loves to philosophize and theorize as much as he loves hanging out on the beach with his family, Sanford studied philosophy in college at Santa Clara University and even has the Aristotle word “eudaimonia” tattooed on his arm. To Aristotle, the word meant the highest form of human good, the only human good that is desirable for its own sake rather than for the sake of others. Which is also the guiding principle behind Sanford’s work and his life.
“Growing up here, in PV, was as great of a childhood as you could possibly have, and there was nobody around. You set out on your bike at eight in the morning and just had to be home before sunset. There were very few rules. I have great memories of growing up here, and most of my friends to this day are people I’ve known since I was three or four years old, “ Sanford shares.
Sanford attended Silver Spur Elementary, Malaga Cove Middle School and he was part of the first class to graduate Peninsula High School.
“My parents still live in PV. My dad was involved in the community when we were young which has inspired me to do the same. He was part of the school board that consolidated the high schools. Because when we were growing up, there were not a lot of kids here, so we had the opposite problem of a population surge. It was more that there are not enough kids.” Allen is the youngest of the three Sanford brothers, all of whom spent their childhoods on the hill. Allen has a deep love and respect for Palos Verdes and the South Bay, and today lives in an old 1920’s home in Palos Verdes that he shares with his wife and daughter.

Sanford is very committed to his work, although his mindset has shifted significantly since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. He admits he has learned a lot in the last few years. He says he is more humble and has learned to shift his thinking. He looks at things differently these days, taking more time to consider all the options before deciding what’s next. Those parklets that have popped up in the Hollywood Riviera and all around the south bay and have kept so many restaurants going, are a project that Sanford found himself involved in during the pandemic.
“We have the Rockefeller in Riviera Village, and I got involved initially because the city didn’t have a cohesive plan. Nobody had a plan early on because it had never been thought of. I got involved by necessity and because of all the hard work that the Board members of the Redondo Village Association volunteered, the program ended up being successful. If I’m to be honest my initial motivation was to protect our business, but I ended up participating in something bigger than any individual – something that was community focused and driven. Redondo Beach recorded a record sales tax year last year due to the parklet program.”
Of course, I was in the three worst businesses you could be in during a pandemic. Restaurants, events, and music and so that all ended,” he says reflectively.
Being the kind of guy that admittedly was running his life at a million miles an hour, the sudden shift, the slowdown, and the resulting lockdown threw Sanford for a loop. Then one day he had an epiphany. “I thought oh wait, maybe we could use public space to offset this thing. So when that came up, I just saw a lane where I could go,” and so he hit that lane running.
“It was natural. We already know how to do all this stuff,” Sanford realized. “This is just temporary construction. This is what we do for a living. So it was just a knee-jerk reaction to just jump in and go, here’s how we should do it, here’s what we’re going to do. Everybody kind of agreed and we just did it, we created it all just two days before July 4th.” Sanford and his team built twenty-two parklets in a week and the customers showed up.
“We had people calling us saying, how do you do it? So we were really on the front side of it. And those decks, they’re great. So fast forward now and the City is looking at making them permanent, which is kind of a culture change,” he admits proudly. “It was rewarding for me to get involved with the community. I really enjoy it. I guess that’s a sign of getting older because I used to not care and now I consider it kind of an obligation to help the community. He says people everywhere have responded positively and seem to agree the parklets are an absolutely perfect addition to beach life. So great are they, there is a possibility that they become permanent. “That was a very special time for me. It was the eleven members of the Redondo Village Association that volunteered the time to make it happen, and I’d venture to say that those parklets saved at least half of the businesses down there in the Riviera, including ours,” he recalls.
“I don’t want our beach culture to get lost. That requires more of us getting involved. I am interested in being part of the inevitable change while protecting what is important to the community.” Sanford is also at the forefront of some big changes. In an effort to include the whole community in the BeachLife, (BeachLife Festival is slated to return to Redondo May 13-15), Sanford and his team have announced the addition of a second festival coming in September, which will feature Country & Americana music focused on the central California cowboy surfer culture. He is also opening another restaurant in the Riviera Village next to Rockefeller called BeachLife Restaurant, which he says will be “inspired by the old Chart House, before it was corporate” as the inspiration, and a community center in Redondo waterfront called the California Surf Club, which he hopes will become a meeting place for like-minded people that love the ocean and culture. “BeachLife has been lucky enough to be a part of the Redondo Waterfront revival, and we are very motivated and excited to be a part of the changes coming down there which are sorely needed. At the same time, I think its clear that our community loves the active, outdoor lifestyle instead of movie theatres & malls, and hopefully the BeachLife Festival has captured the imagination of what can be possible down there.” This flourishing son of the South Bay is leading his most authentic BeachLife and inspiring his whole community to come along.

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