The Laguna Beach Restaurant Reshuffle That Locals Actually Need To Track This Summer

For most of 2025, four of the most watched storefronts in town sat dark. The Heisler Building across from Main Beach. The stilt-house perch at 858 South Coast. The Ti Amo building in South Laguna. The eclectic old Dizz's As Is south of downtown. Any one of them going quiet would have been a story. All four at once felt like the town was holding its breath.

That breath is out. Between March and July 2026, every one of those addresses turned back on, and a fifth long-vacant space joined the run. The interesting part is not that Laguna got new restaurants. It is that the openings are not random. Read them together and you can see the town sorting itself into two dining economies, downtown and bookends, with different rules for each.

The Heisler Corner Is Awake Again

The most-watched vacancy in Laguna belonged to the Heisler Building at 400 South Coast Highway, dark since Bodega and Skyloft closed in January 2025. L.A.-based Pegasus Investments bought the building in 2023 from longtime resident Sam Goldstein for $16.5 million, and the ground floor has now been reworked as Noble Ace, a supper-club concept from former Mastro's Ocean Club chef Magellan Moore and partner Elizabeth Schreiber.

Noble Ace opened Monday, June 29th. The team is deeper than most independent openings pull off in a single hire cycle. Hillari Galindo moved into the General Manager position after two decades with Mastro's Ocean Club and then Red O of Newport Beach, and Danny Reyes returned as Assistant GM after starting his Laguna career at Odessa. Design is by Ralitsa Kombakis of Studio Rallou, combining the character of the historic Heisler Building with the feel of a modern supper club, and current hours run Sunday through Thursday from 4:30 to 10 p.m. and Friday and Saturday from 4:30 to 11 p.m.

Schreiber described the pricing spread this way to What Now Orange County: "This is like if Hillstone and Mastro's had a baby." That is a useful shorthand for where the room is aimed. The bar with its piano is a walk-in evening; the upstairs and the chef's table are a reservation night. Locals now have both under the same roof at the corner across from Main Beach, which has not been true in years.

What Took Over Dizz's Signals The Other Half Of The Story

Two miles south, the reshuffle looked completely different. Longstanding Laguna Beach restaurant Dizz's As Is closed on March 13, after being owned and operated by the Pitz family for more than 40 years since Marcel Pitz founded it in 1977. The tenant that stepped in was not another continental menu with rack of lamb and raspberry duck. Small's Smash Club, founded by professional snowboarder Jordan Small, took the space at 2794 S Pacific Coast Hwy as its second location after opening the original in San Clemente in 2025, keeping the ocean view and the existing bar and liquor license.

Where Noble Ace stacked veteran fine-dining talent, Small's arrived with a tighter menu built around a smash burger, tallow fries and onion rings, plus beer and cocktails. Same building, entirely different economic bet. Small's opened on a Friday in June with a fan line that stretched through the weekend, which tells you how the demand curve for a casual concept looks in this town when the room has ocean glass.

Right behind it came another counter-friendly opening. El Matatan, from owner Oscar Garcia, expanded down from the City of Orange in June. Garcia's menu offers a blend of Cuban, Dominican and authentic Mexico City fare, with craft cocktails, shareable pitchers, wine and beer. Familiar face at the door: Garcia hired Omar from Carmelita's as the residing GM, which matters if you have been going to Carmelita's for years and wondered where he went.

The North And South Bookends Are Both A Pizza Brand

The Truly Pizza team, which opened in Dana Point in 2023 with its second location scheduled for Laguna Beach in early 2026 and Venice following in late 2026, is doing something no other operator in town is currently doing: opening two Laguna concepts at once, one at each end of Coast Highway.

The North Laguna site takes over 320 N. Coast Highway, the former "3" restaurant, with a South Laguna sibling at 31727 Coast Highway in the long-shuttered Ti Amo. The full-service pizza concept goes north; a daytime bagel counter goes south. Trade filings confirm the split. A shop called Truly Bagels is slated for 31729 Coast Highway per OC Health plan review documents, with Donna Baldwin, who co-owns Truly Pizza in Dana Point, as the registered agent.

If you live between Aliso and Three Arch, the practical effect is a walkable South Laguna bagel option that has not existed since Ti Amo went dark years ago. If you live in North Laguna, the practical effect is that your closest sit-down Italian just changed operator without leaving the block.

The Stilt Building Finally Has A Tenant

The old San Shi Go space at 858 South Coast, the raised building locals think of as the "stilt" restaurant, sat empty through a delayed 2025 debut. Amorelia is now in soft open with 185 seats, run by Gloria Seretti and her son Daniel Paniagua as their first expansion of the family's long-running Costa Mesa Mexican restaurant, this time with a Mexico City-centric fine dining focus. Reservations run through the house line at (949) 593-0009.

The building itself got worked over. The entry-level floor now carries a showpiece bar and a sizable wine structure, with handcrafted design details from Mexico throughout, plus a raw bar on the east side and patio dining. Two blocks up the highway, one of the newer counter concepts filled a vacancy of its own. Nalu Poke, Tea & Boba is moving in next to Better Buzz Coffee at 248 S. Coast Highway, taking the space Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory occupied after arriving in 1984 as one of that company's first outliers from Durango, Colorado.

The Openings, Side By Side

What The Pattern Actually Says About Laguna

Read the list twice. The full-service, reservation-required bets are clustered downtown: Noble Ace and Amorelia within a few blocks of Main Beach, aimed at hotel guests and locals willing to price a Friday night at Montage-adjacent numbers. The counter and daytime concepts are pushed to the edges: burgers at the south end, bagels at the deep-south end, pizza and poke on the northern approach.

This is not an accident of leases. Laguna's own trade press has been tracking the shift as a deliberate one. Best of Laguna Beach's year-end review framed 2025 as a recalibration of risk, one that increasingly favors shorter daytime stays, faster turns and lower operational exposure, and counted 15 new food and beverage concept openings announced through the site in the year, alongside seven concept losses. For a town of Laguna's size, that is a full lap of the roster.

For a resident, the practical read is this. Downtown blocks are increasingly the place you go when you want the reservation, the piano, the caviar course. The edges of Coast Highway are increasingly the place you go when you want a burger, a slice, a bagel, or a bowl without giving up an evening to get it. That has not always been true here. It is worth knowing which category a given errand is falling into before you point the car in one direction or the other.

Sequencing A Realistic Week

If you want to visit these openings without turning them into a project, the easier approach is to pair one with something you were doing anyway. A short list of anchors that already run on a schedule:

• First Thursday of the month. Free trolley rides extend for Art Walk visitors, the Laguna Art Museum is open complimentary from 5 to 9 p.m., and Hotel Laguna starts at 5 p.m. featuring three selected artists. Park once, walk to Noble Ace after.
• A South Laguna morning. Truly Bagels will open in a stretch of Coast Highway that has been quiet at breakfast for years. Pair it with a Thousand Steps walk before the parking situation tightens.
• A weeknight downtown. Amorelia's bar and raw bar sit at the ground floor, which makes the stilt building a workable walk-in for a Tuesday even after the dining room fills.
• A Friday burger. Small's still has a line, so plan for the early or late edge of the dinner window rather than 7 p.m.

The version of Laguna Beach that will exist by Labor Day is not the version we had at Memorial Day. The dark storefronts locals had been driving past for a year are now the reservations locals are trying to get. Knowing which room is which, and which end of Coast Highway to point at, is the difference between a good Friday and a wasted one.

If you are weighing a move within Laguna, a purchase near the corridor, or the sale of a home whose value ties to how walkable this stretch of Coast Highway feels, Angi Ciccarelli can talk through what these openings mean for your specific block. Schedule a free consultation.