The Pattern Behind Laguna Beach's Coast Highway Restaurant Reshuffle
August 20, 2026
August 20, 2026
For most of 2025, four of the most-watched storefronts in town sat dark. The historic Heisler Building across from Main Beach. The stilt-house perch at 858 South Coast Highway. The Ti Amo building down in South Laguna. The old Dizz's As Is, a fixture south of downtown since 1977. Any one of those going quiet would have been worth a conversation at the farmers market. All four sitting empty at once felt like the town was holding its breath.
Between March and July of this year, every one of those addresses turned back on. A fifth long-vacant space joined the run. If you've driven Coast Highway lately and wondered why it suddenly feels like a different street, that's why. But the interesting part isn't that Laguna got six new restaurants in five months. It's what those six restaurants are actually betting on, and what that bet tells you about how this town eats now versus how it used to.
The Heisler Building at 400 South Coast Highway, empty since Bodega and Skyloft closed there in early 2025, reopened this summer as Noble Ace, a Golden Age Hollywood-inspired restaurant and bar from Chef Magellan Moore, formerly of Mastro's Ocean Club, and owners Elizabeth and Tom Schreiber. Down the highway in South Laguna, Dizz's As Is closed for good on March 13 after more than 40 years under the Pitz family. Small's Smash Club, the burger concept from professional snowboarder Jordan Small, took over that space at 2794 South Pacific Coast Highway, keeping the ocean view and the existing liquor license.
The old San Shi Go stilt-house building at 858 South Coast Highway became Amorelia, a Mexico City-focused concept from longtime Costa Mesa restaurateur Gloria Seretti and her son Daniel Paniagua, expanding their family business outside Costa Mesa for the first time. And the Truly Pizza team, which first opened in Dana Point in June 2023, is now bookending the entire town at once: a full-service pizza concept at 320 North Coast Highway in the former "3" restaurant space, and a counter-service Truly Bagels at 31727 Coast Highway in the long-shuttered Ti Amo building down south. Round it out with Nulu Poke Tea & Boba moving into the space vacated by Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, a Coast Highway tenant since 1984, and you have the fullest turnover this stretch of highway has seen in years.
Here's where those six sit, mapped against what they replaced:
Line those six up by service model and something clean falls out. Three are full-service concepts built around a dinner reservation: Noble Ace, Truly Pizza, and Amorelia. The other three are counter-service or single-item concepts built for a faster turn: Small's Smash Club, Truly Bagels, and Nulu Poke Tea & Boba. That's not a coincidence of timing. It's two different operators reading the same street and placing opposite bets on how people in this town actually want to spend an evening, or a Tuesday lunch, right now.
Noble Ace is the clearest full-service statement. Chef Magellan Moore and Elizabeth Schreiber built the concept around a friendship that goes back more than a decade. Schreiber told a reporter:
"Magellan and I met 12 years ago when we worked together at Mastro's while getting my degree from USC."
That's a restaurant built on a slow-cooked idea, not a quick pivot. Small's Smash Club, down the highway in a building that spent four decades serving rack of lamb and raspberry duck, is the opposite instinct: a tighter menu of smash burgers, tallow fries, and onion rings built for a faster turn. Same coastline, same building's ocean view, completely different economics behind the counter.
If you're wondering why five buildings that sat empty for the better part of a year all found tenants within a few months of each other, the honest answer is that restaurant operators have been recalibrating how much risk they're willing to carry on a full-service dinner shift. Local tracking of Laguna's food and beverage scene counted 15 new openings against seven closures across 2025, and the newer concepts have skewed toward shorter daytime service and faster turns rather than the long dinner shifts that defined the last generation of Coast Highway restaurants. Reading this year's reopenings against that backdrop, the split between Noble Ace's dinner-house bet and the counter-service concepts around it looks less like variety and more like operators hedging in both directions at once.
None of this is happening in a quiet month. Pageant of the Masters is in the middle of its 2026 run at the Irvine Bowl, performing nightly through September 4 with this year's production, "The Greatest of All Time." Right next door on Laguna Canyon Road, the Sawdust Art Festival is running its open-air village of working artist studios through the end of the season, and the Festival of Arts is showing work from 140 award-winning Orange County artists on the same stretch of road. First Thursdays Art Walk falls on the first Thursday of every month, which puts the next one on September 3, with galleries along Coast Highway and Cliff Drive open free from 6 to 9 p.m.
A short trolley ride separates Noble Ace at the north end of town from Small's Smash Club down south, which is roughly the same trip as an evening spent moving between the Sawdust grounds, the Festival of Arts gallery, and the Irvine Bowl. If you live here, you already know the Pageant is happening. What's less obvious is that the same few weeks closing out summer are also the exact window in which this town's dinner options changed the most.
Two free trolley routes are running to handle exactly this kind of night. The Coastal Route covers the length of Coast Highway from Heisler Park in North Laguna down through downtown, South Laguna, and out to the Ritz-Carlton at the Dana Point line, arriving every 20 to 30 minutes and running until 10 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. The Canyon Route adds service on Laguna Canyon Road for festival traffic, running Thursday through Sunday into the evening. Parking at the Act V lot at 1900 Laguna Canyon Road is free on weekends, and the trolley connects directly to the festival grounds from there, which matters most on a Friday or Saturday night when Laguna Canyon Road backs up from the 405 and 73.
Between now and Labor Day, that combination, a genuinely different restaurant lineup and a trolley system built to move you between it and the last weeks of festival season, is the version of this town worth using before it resets for fall.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a home's position on this stretch of coast, that's a different conversation, and one worth having with someone who watches this market as closely as the restaurant scene. Lena Ghezel works Laguna Beach and the surrounding coastal Orange County market year-round. Request Your Home Valuation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
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