Laguna Beach Got New Restaurants This Year. It Also Got Two Different Dining Scenes.

Drive Coast Highway through downtown Laguna in early 2025 and you'd pass four dark storefronts in the space of a mile. The Heisler Building sat empty across from Main Beach. The raised "stilt" building at 858 South Coast Highway had been vacant since its last tenant closed. The old Ti Amo building in South Laguna hadn't served a meal in years. And the fixture at 2794 South Coast Highway, the one Laguna knew as Dizz's As Is, was still running, but its 40-year clock was about to run out.

By July 2026, every one of those addresses was serving food again, and a fifth long-empty space had joined them. That's the headline version. The more useful version, if you actually live here and want to know where to eat on a Tuesday versus a Friday, is what kind of restaurant moved into each address. Look at the pattern block by block and Laguna isn't getting one new dining scene. It's getting two, split by exactly where on Coast Highway you're standing.

What Actually Reopened

The Heisler Building, dark since Bodega closed in early 2025, reopened in June as Noble Ace, a Golden Age Hollywood-inspired speakeasy from chef Magellan Moore of Mastro's Ocean Club and owners Elizabeth and Tom Schreiber. Elizabeth and Magellan met twelve years ago working together at Mastro's while she finished her degree at USC, and she'd pitched him on opening a restaurant together every year since. He kept saying no. "But about a year ago, he finally agreed," she told the Orange County Register. The room opened Monday, June 29, with Hillari Galindo, who spent two decades at Mastro's Ocean Club and then Red O in Newport Beach, running the floor as general manager, and Danny Reyes, who started his Laguna career at Odessa, as assistant GM. Tom Schreiber has described the pricing as something like Hillstone and Mastro's having a baby. Hours run Sunday through Thursday 4:30 to 10 p.m. and Friday and Saturday until 11.

Two blocks south, the stilt building at 858 South Coast Highway, the one longtime residents remember as San Shi Go and later Okura and Hush, spent nearly two years sitting empty through a stalled 2025 launch before reopening in spring as Amorelia Cocina Artesanal. Owner Gloria Seretti, whose family has run a Mexican restaurant in Costa Mesa for decades, brought her son Daniel Paniagua in on the concept, a 185-seat, Mexico City-focused dining room with a raw bar, wagyu, uni, and five distinct seating areas.

"I knew for years that I needed to be in Laguna Beach because I wanted to expand to more... and this is THE creative place you do that," Seretti said. "It took a few years of looking for the perfect place, but I believe this place was meant to be for us."

The grand opening drew community leaders and locals on Sunday, June 14. By September, the restaurant had become enough of a scene that Sammy Hagar showed up and posted about drinking his own tequila there, and earlier in the summer NBA Hall of Famer Ray Allen and Mark Cuban dropped in during a World Cup finale watch party.

Down at 2794 South Coast Highway, the Pitz family closed Dizz's As Is on March 13 after running it since Marcel Pitz founded it in 1977. What moved in wasn't another continental menu. Small's Smash Club, founded by professional snowboarder Jordan Small, opened its second location there in June, its first having launched in San Clemente in 2025. Small's kept the ocean view and the existing liquor license, swapped in a smash burger and tallow fries menu, and drew a line that stretched through its opening weekend.

Meanwhile Truly Pizza, the Dana Point original that first opened in June 2023, expanded to Laguna with a split concept. The full-service pizza restaurant took over 320 North Coast Highway, the former "3" space beside Urth Caffé and across from the Laguna Art Museum, a spot longtime residents also remember as Madison Square & Garden Café before it closed in 2018. Co-owner Donna Baldwin has said the North Laguna room stays true to the original Truly Pizza format, with all seating outside. Its South Laguna sibling, Truly Bagels, took the long-shuttered Ti Amo building at 31727 Coast Highway as a daytime counter-service concept that doubles as a commissary kitchen supplying both pizza locations.

The fifth reactivated address belongs to Kevin Joseph, who took over the former Thai by the Sea space in South Laguna and is running three concepts out of one building: an omakase raw bar, a coffee and juice counter called Urchin Coastal, and a broader dining operation, an approach no other operator in town is currently running at that scale. A few blocks north, Nalu Poke Tea & Boba filled the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory space at 248 South Coast Highway, ending that chocolate shop's run there since 1984. And at midday, El Matatan opened for lunch in June, bringing Cuban, Dominican, and Mexico City cooking from owner Oscar Garcia, who expanded the concept from the City of Orange with Omar, formerly of Carmelita's, running the floor.

The Split Nobody Planned

Line up those addresses and a pattern falls out on its own. The two restaurants that require a reservation and commit a diner to a full evening, Noble Ace and Amorelia, both landed within a few blocks of Main Beach, on the stretch of Coast Highway where hotel guests, Pageant crowds, and evening foot traffic are heaviest. Everything else, the pizza, the bagels, the poke, the smash burgers, the raw bar and coffee counter sharing one roof, sits at the edges or moves fast enough that a diner isn't locked into a two-hour seating.

Near Main Beach, betting on the evening:

• Noble Ace, 400 South Coast Highway, reservation-driven speakeasy dinner
• Amorelia Cocina Artesanal, 858 South Coast Highway, 185-seat reservation dining room

At the bookends, betting on speed:

• Truly Pizza, 320 North Coast Highway, all-outdoor full service near the Art Museum
• Truly Bagels, 31727 Coast Highway, South Laguna, daytime counter service
• Nalu Poke Tea & Boba, 248 South Coast Highway, quick-service near Main Beach
• Small's Smash Club, 2794 South Coast Highway, casual bar and grill
• Empire Oyster Raw Bar and Urchin Coastal Coffee, one South Laguna building, two fast-turn concepts

Nobody signed a master plan to build it this way. But the addresses tell the story better than any press release would.

Why Operators Are Betting This Way

Diane Armitage, who tracks Laguna's restaurant scene through her Best of Laguna Beach newsletter, counted 15 new food and beverage openings across 2025 against seven closures. She's described the shift as a recalibration of risk, one that increasingly favors shorter daytime stays, faster turns, and lower operational exposure.

That framing matches what's happening on the ground. A dinner-only reservation restaurant needs a customer willing to plan an evening around it, and downtown Laguna, with its hotel guests, Pageant of the Masters traffic, and Main Beach foot traffic, is where that customer already exists in volume. A counter-service concept needs volume and quick turnover instead, and that's exactly what the north end near the Art Museum and the south end near Thousand Steps and Aliso Beach can deliver from surfers, dog walkers, and day-trippers moving through rather than settling in for a two-hour meal.

Put another way, the restaurant math downtown is built around a two-hour table turn at dinner prices. The restaurant math at the bookends is built around a five-minute counter transaction repeated all day. Both bets can be right in the same town at the same time, on the same three-mile stretch of highway, because they're not actually competing for the same customer.

What's Actually Happening This Week

The AVP Laguna Open just wrapped its run at Main Beach from September 18 through 20, the final stop of the 2026 AVP pro season and the world's longest-running beach volleyball tournament, still played toes-in-the-sand with no stadium separating the crowd from the court. Sunday closed with the Battle of the Beaches, local teams from Victoria Beach, Three Arch Bay, Emerald Bay, and Main Beach playing for neighborhood bragging rights.

Amorelia is leaning into the momentum from its celebrity sightings with its first Wine Walk, "A Journey of Wine, Art & Culture," launching October 1 during First Thursdays Art Walk. And Bar ízi, the small-plates concept taking over the old Cafe Zoolu and Evan's Gourmet space at Glenneyre and Thalia under owner Sam Rabon, had originally targeted an end-of-August or early-September debut. A late-August job listing for a lead server there, describing a locally sourced, seasonal menu with a natural wine program, suggests the opening has slipped into early fall rather than landing on the original date. Worth watching if you've been holding out for that corner to come back to life.

If you've lived here through a few of these turnovers already, you know the pattern doesn't stop. Buildings on this stretch of highway have changed hands before and will again. What's useful is knowing which kind of night you're signing up for before you park the car.

Suzi and Ryan at DaileybytheSea spend as much time walking Coast Highway as they do walking listings, because a town's rhythm, who's booked solid and who's turning tables fast, tells you as much about a neighborhood as any comp sheet. If you're curious what a specific block of Laguna is worth right now, that's a conversation we're always glad to have.