If you drove Coast Highway in January and drove it again in July, you passed at least four different restaurants sitting where longtime institutions used to be. Two of them ran for more than forty years. One space had been dark since early 2025. The turnover was not gradual. It happened in a single six-month window, and it happened almost entirely within a mile and a half of asphalt.
The easy read is that Laguna got a batch of new places to eat. The more honest read, and the one worth carrying into fall, is that the town's dining spine is quietly rebalancing. Diane Armitage's tracking at Best of Laguna Beach counted 15 new food-and-beverage openings across 2025 against seven closures, with newer concepts skewing toward shorter daytime service and faster turns rather than the long full-service dinner shifts that defined the last generation of Coast Highway. Summer 2026 accelerated that shift. What follows is a walking map, north to south, of what actually changed, and the fall calendar to pair it with.
Read the map before you walk it
Before the block-by-block, the shape of the turnover in one glance:
- Closed: Dizz's As Is (South Laguna, closed March 13, 2026 after a 40-plus-year run) and Bodega (Heisler Building, closed early 2025).
- Opened or soft-opened by mid-summer: Small's Smash Club, El Matatan, Amorelia, Nalu Poke Tea & Boba.
- Announced with 2026 openings on deck: Noble Ace, Truly Pizza (North Laguna), Truly Bagels (South Laguna), Empire Oyster Raw Bar.
Three of the eight new arrivals lean Mexico or Latin-forward. Three are daytime-friendly counter or single-item concepts. Only one, Noble Ace, is a full-service dinner-house play in the classic Coast Highway mold. That ratio is the whole story.
North Laguna: the speakeasy bet and a pizza anchor
Start at 400 South Coast Highway, at the Heisler Building. The historic Heisler Building, vacant since Bodega closed in early 2025, will soon teem with new life after Noble Ace announced its upcoming opening. The restaurant, which describes itself as a "Golden Age Hollywood-inspired speakeasy restaurant and bar," is the brainchild of Chef Magellan Moore of Mastro's Ocean Club and Elizabeth and Tom Schreiber. Noble Ace is due to open Summer 2026 at the historic Heisler Building.
Noble Ace is the outlier in this year's turnover. It is the only new full-service dinner-house arriving on Coast Highway, and it is arriving in the town's most photographed civic building. The concept, described in press materials as a Golden Age Hollywood speakeasy, is the opposite bet from the smash-burger and bagel-counter openings a mile down the road.
A few blocks up, at 320 North Coast Highway, the former "3" space is being taken over by Truly Pizza's second location. Truly Pizza is expected to open in North Laguna in 2026 in the old "3" space, while Truly Pizza's South Laguna location, in the old Ti Amo building, is slated to operate as Truly Bagels, adding a counter service, daytime-focused concept to the mix. The same operator is bookending the town with two distinct concepts, one full-service, one counter. That is a hedge, and a smart one.
The Village stretch: the stilt building comes back
Cross into the Village and the story turns to 858 South Coast Highway, the elevated building most locals still call the stilt restaurant. The new 185-seat restaurant is now in soft open in the old San Shi Go space, and Laguna Beach has a new wave of restaurant openings this week and on the near horizon. For decades, the long-standing Costa Mesa family-owned restaurant has specialized in Mexican cuisine, and with their first expansion, owner Gloria Seretti and her son, Daniel Paniagua, have taken this new Laguna location to a Mexico City-centric finer dining focus.
Amorelia's arrival is worth pausing on because it almost did not happen. Amorelia was scheduled to open in the former San Shi Go space in July 2025, and within weeks of its launch, an unexpected departure of its lead chef delayed the opening; the team continued to work toward a 2026 debut. The room is significant beyond its 185 seats. The entry-level floor has been outfitted with a showpiece bar and a significantly sizable wine structure, all of which carries handcrafted design details from Mexico throughout, including the few steps from the bar area up to the main dining room, the Raw Bar, and patio dining.
Two blocks north of Amorelia, across from Main Beach, the old Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory space has a new tenant. Nalu Poke Tea & Boba is filling in the vacated Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory space on Coast Highway across from Main Beach at 248 South Coast Highway, next to Better Buzz Coffee; Rocky Mountain Chocolate first landed in Laguna Beach in 1984 as one of the company's first outliers from the mother ship in Durango, Colorado. A forty-two-year run gave way to a counter concept in under a year. Read that alongside Dizz's and the pattern holds.
South Laguna: burgers, bagels, and a raw bar
The most talked-about handover of the year sits at 2794 South Coast Highway. Longstanding Laguna Beach restaurant Dizz's As Is closed on March 13, 2026, and the Coast Highway restaurant was owned and operated by the Pitz family for more than 40 years after being founded in 1977 by Marcel Pitz. Small's Smash Club opened June 2026 as its second location after San Clemente, founded by pro snowboarder Jordan Small, and kept the ocean-view bar and liquor license from Dizz's.
The liquor license detail matters. It is the reason Small's opened on the timeline it did and the reason the ocean-view bar survives. Retaining an existing full liquor license in this stretch of coast is a real operational advantage, and it is a quiet reason to expect the Small's footprint to hold through the shoulder season.
A few doors from that scene, El Matatan opened its doors in June. The popular Latin cuisine-styled El Matatan has finally made its way from the City of Orange to Orange County's darling, Laguna Beach, with owner Oscar Garcia beginning dinner soft openings before opening for lunch, and Garcia's menu offers a blend of Cuban, Dominican and authentic Mexico City fare. Oscar has snagged our beloved Omar from Carmelita's to be the residing GM. If you knew Omar at Carmelita's, you already know where you are eating in September.
Further south, at 31727 Coast Highway, the long-shuttered Ti Amo building is being reopened as Truly Bagels, a counter-service daytime companion to the Truly Pizza operation up north. And per the summer field reporting, Empire Oyster Raw Bar is opening in South Laguna, an omakase raw bar in the former Thai-restaurant space a half block from AHBA.
The pattern under the openings
Walk that list back and the shape is clear. The three closures that anchor this year's turnover ran, cumulatively, for close to a century. Their replacements are, with one exception, smaller-footprint, shorter-service, faster-turn concepts. What is emerging in Laguna Beach isn't a rejection of hospitality, but a recalibration of risk, one that increasingly favors shorter daytime stays, faster turns and lower operational exposure.
For a resident, that recalibration has a practical consequence. The lunch and mid-afternoon options on Coast Highway are quietly expanding. The traditional full-service dinner shift, the seven-to-ten reservation that Dizz's and Bodega used to hold down, is contracting. Noble Ace is the counterweight to that trend, not a continuation of it. Where you take out-of-town guests for a long dinner in September is a different question than it was in September 2024.
A fall calendar worth marking
The dining map is only half the fall. The other half is the arts and civic calendar, and the dates worth putting on the fridge before Labor Day:
- Pageant of the Masters, "The Greatest of All Time." In 2026, the Pageant presents "The Greatest of All Time," and the Festival Art Show features the work of over 100 Orange County artists. The 2026 production is longtime Pageant Director Diane Challis Davy's answer to a deliberately unanswerable prompt; in the Laguna Beach Independent, Davy laughed at the idea that art history has one clear greatest, then explained the show was built by picking forty works that could each argue the case. The closing stretch of the run is the quieter, better time to go.
- City Fall 2026 Activity Guide. Registration for the Fall 2026 Activity Guide opens on July 31 for classes running from September through December; visit www.lagunabeachcity.net/recreation or call (949) 464-6645 to learn more. Susi Q Center and the Community & Recreation Center are the two anchors.
- Chamber calendar into fall. The Laguna Beach Chamber calendar carries September 3 arts and community programming, a Pretend City Playraiser on Sunday, September 27, and a Chamber of Commerce Government Affairs event on Thursday, October 1.
None of these are new. The point, for a resident, is that they land in a fall where the storefronts around them look different than they did in April.
One last thought before September
The story on the ground is not "new restaurants opened." The story is which buildings changed hands, and what that says about who is betting on Laguna right now. The people betting on the town this year are, mostly, independent operators with a single existing location and a specific point of view. That is a different investor profile than the group operators and legacy families who shaped Coast Highway in the 1980s and 1990s. Whether that shift produces a stronger or thinner dining town over the next decade is an open question. For this fall, it produces a walkable, curious mile and a half.
If you are considering how a shifting neighborhood character affects the value of a Laguna Beach home, or you would simply like a longer conversation about the coast this fall, Chris Sirianni is available for a private consultation.
