The New Restaurants In Laguna Beach Aren't Replacing What You Think

Drive Coast Highway right now and you'll pass six addresses that changed hands in the last five months. That's not a rounding error for a town this size. It's a real shift, and the shift has a shape: the spaces that finally turned over after years or decades under one owner did not get replaced by more of the same. They split into two very different bets, and almost nothing landed in the middle.

The pattern hiding in plain sight

For most of Laguna Beach's modern history, when a dinner house closed, another dinner house took the lease. That's how a town builds a reputation as a place where you dress up and make a reservation. This year broke that habit. Look at what actually moved into the spaces that emptied out between March and June 2026, and you'll find operators making one of two calls: go big on a chef-driven evening concept, or go small and daytime-first with counter service. The straight swap, dinner house for dinner house, barely happened.

Start with the address every longtime resident already has an opinion about.

The Heisler Building sat dark for over a year

The building at 400 S. Coast Highway has been vacant since Bodega closed in early 2025. That's more than a year of one of the most photographed corners in town sitting empty, directly across from Main Beach. Noble Ace finally opened there this summer, and the ownership team didn't hedge. Chef Magellan Moore, who spent twelve years in the Mastro's Ocean Club kitchen, built a menu that includes short rib stroganoff with handmade pappardelle and jumbo beef potstickers served with blue cheese fondue, according to Greer's OC. The cocktail list runs to a cantaloupe and olive oil martini. This is a full commitment to evening dining, seated, reservations, a piano in the bar.

Co-owner Elizabeth Schreiber had been circling this idea for years before it happened.

"I left the restaurant world to have a family and do real estate."

That's how she described the decade between leaving the industry and opening Noble Ace, in an interview with What Now Orange County. The building waited over a year for the right tenant. It got one willing to bet on a 150-seat, multi-room concept with a private dining room and wine lockers.

Dizz's closed after 40-plus years. What replaced it wasn't another Dizz's.

A few miles south, a different kind of turnover happened faster and told a different story. Dizz's As Is, the Coast Highway institution the Pitz family had run since Marcel Pitz founded it in 1977, closed for good on March 13, 2026, according to Patch. Forty-plus years of eclectic decor and a continental menu that included rack of lamb and raspberry duck, gone in a single closing.

What moved in was Small's Smash Club, the second location of a burger concept founded by professional snowboarder Jordan Small that started as a backyard operation during the pandemic before opening its first brick-and-mortar in San Clemente in 2025. Small's kept the ocean-view bar and the existing liquor license from Dizz's, according to What Now Orange County, but the menu is smash burgers, not surf and turf. A 47-year continental dining institution didn't get replaced by another one. It got replaced by a regional burger brand that happens to keep the same view.

The daytime bets are quieter, but there are more of them

While Noble Ace and Small's grabbed headlines, a second wave of openings picked a completely different format. These are the counter-service, commissary-model concepts that bet on lunch and morning traffic rather than the dinner reservation.

El Matatan, which opened for lunch in June 2026 with Cuban, Dominican, and Mexico City cooking from owner Oscar Garcia, made the same daytime-first choice. The restaurant's general manager, Omar, previously worked at Carmelita's before taking on the day-to-day at El Matatan. Truly Bagels in South Laguna doubles as a commissary kitchen, prepping dough and sauces for both the North Laguna and South Laguna Truly locations. Neither concept is trying to compete with Noble Ace's Friday night reservation list. They're competing for the 11:30 a.m. lunch crowd and the coffee-run traffic that used to skip these blocks entirely.

Amorelia is the one full dinner concept in this wave that doesn't fit neatly into either column. The 185-seat restaurant in the old San Shi Go stilt building at 858 S. Coast Highway comes from the Seretti family, whose original Costa Mesa restaurant has served Mexican food for decades. Owner Gloria Seretti told Best of Laguna Beach she had scouted the town for years before landing this space.

"I knew for years that I needed to be in Laguna Beach because I wanted to expand to more."

That's a dinner house bet on the same scale as Noble Ace. Both of this summer's biggest openings came from operators with deep roots elsewhere in Orange County, not brand-new restaurant groups testing the market cold.

The festival grounds picked up the same split

If you want to see this pattern play out in miniature, walk into the Sawdust Art Festival, running through September 6, 2026, at 935 Laguna Canyon Road. The festival's food lineup added new vendors this season that mirror exactly what's happening a few miles away on the highway. The Cove by Starfish is serving a churro bao bun that's become a fast favorite, AhbA made its debut with elevated burgers, and Taco Loco, led by chef Gonzo Rebollar, brought a longtime local favorite's tacos onto festival grounds for the first time, according to Locale Magazine. Laguna Beach residents get free admission to Sawdust every Thursday with valid ID, which makes it an easy stop on a weeknight even if you're not planning to buy any art.

What this means for how you actually spend an evening here

None of this changes property values or school boundaries. It changes the small, daily math of where you go when you don't feel like cooking. A year ago, if you wanted a casual lunch on Coast Highway that wasn't a to-go sandwich, your options were thinner. Now there's a real daytime economy building alongside the dinner-house tradition the town has always been known for, and the two aren't competing so much as splitting the day between them.

The next First Thursdays Art Walk lands on September 3, 2026, running 6 to 9 p.m. with free admission and trolley service, according to the First Thursdays Art Walk organization. It's as good a night as any to walk from the Laguna Art Museum down toward the Heisler Building and see for yourself whether Noble Ace has settled into the space the way the town has been waiting for.

Living here means these small shifts add up faster than a headline can capture them. If you're watching what's changing on your own block and wondering what it means for your home's place in this market, Clara Blunk tracks Laguna Beach at exactly this level of detail. Schedule a Heart-Centered Consultation whenever you're ready to talk it through.