Laguna Beach Summer 2026 Restaurants: What Changed

If you've lived in Laguna long enough to remember eating rack of lamb under the eclectic decor at Dizz's As Is, you probably assumed that when a restaurant like that finally closed, something similar would take its place. A new owner, a slightly updated menu, the same white-tablecloth rhythm. That is not what happened this year, and it is not what happened at any of the other addresses that sat dark for months on Coast Highway.

Four of the town's most-watched storefronts went quiet in 2025. Between March and July of this year, every one of them turned back on. What moved in tells you something about how Laguna's food economy actually works right now, and it is not the story of restaurants replacing restaurants. It is two very different bets, made at the same time, in the same town, with almost nothing landing in between.

The Building That Sat Dark the Longest

The Heisler Building at 400 South Coast Highway had been empty since Bodega closed in early 2025, and it was the most-watched vacancy in town for a reason. The building is historic, it sits close to Main Beach, and months of silence in that spot felt louder than it should have.

Noble Ace opened there this summer, describing itself as a Golden Age Hollywood-inspired speakeasy, built by chef Magellan Moore, who came from Mastro's Ocean Club, alongside owners Elizabeth and Tom Schreiber. Elizabeth told the Orange County Register she and Moore had worked together at Mastro's twelve years earlier while she was finishing her degree at USC, and that she had pitched him on opening a restaurant together nearly every year since. He finally said yes about a year ago.

The pricing tells you where this sits on the spectrum. As Schreiber described the concept, it is close to "if Hillstone and Mastro's had a baby." That is a full-service, reservation-driven, upstairs-chef's-table kind of restaurant. It is the most expensive bet made in Laguna's restaurant scene this year, and it landed in the single hardest address to fill.

The Rest of the Turnover Splits the Same Way

Two miles south of the Heisler Building, the pattern repeats. Dizz's As Is, run by the Pitz family since Marcel Pitz founded it in 1977, closed for good on March 13 after more than 40 years at 2794 South Pacific Coast Highway. It was replaced not by another continental menu with duck and rack of lamb, but by Small's Smash Club, a burger concept founded by professional snowboarder Jordan Small that started as a backyard operation during the pandemic before its first real location opened in San Clemente last year. Small's kept the ocean view and the existing liquor license, added a tighter menu built around a smash burger, tallow fries and onion rings, and opened on a Friday in June to a line that stretched through the weekend.

The same operator can make both bets at once. The Truly Pizza team, which first opened in Dana Point in June 2023, chose this year to open two Laguna locations rather than one, and put them at opposite ends of town. A full-service Truly Pizza is taking the former "3" restaurant space at 320 North Coast Highway, well north of downtown. A separate, counter-service Truly Bagels concept is filling the long-shuttered Ti Amo building at 31727 Coast Highway, down in South Laguna not far from where Small's just opened. One is a sit-down dinner spot. The other is a daytime bagel counter. Same ownership group, same year, opposite operating models, on opposite ends of the same highway.

Here is a quick map of what actually changed and where:

Where the Middle Used to Be

Look at that table again and the gap is obvious. Nobody reopened a mid-range, full-bar, everyday dinner house in any of these spaces. Amorelia, which soft-opened this year in the old San Shi Go "stilt" building at 858 South Coast Highway, is owned by Gloria Seretti and her son Daniel Paniagua and pushes upmarket into Mexico City-centric fine dining, complete with a raw bar and a dedicated wine structure. Meanwhile Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, which had operated at 248 South Coast Highway since 1984, is giving way to Nulu Poke Tea & Boba, a fast-casual concept next to Better Buzz Coffee.

Local food writer Diane Armitage, who has tracked the town's restaurant turnover for years through her newsletter Best of Laguna Beach, counted 15 new food and beverage concepts opening across 2025 against seven that closed. That is a real net gain, and it would read as a healthy year for anyone just counting openings and closures. But counting misses the shape of the change. The businesses that closed this year, Dizz's and Rocky Mountain Chocolate among them, were exactly the kind of mid-tier, decades-old, full-service or full-shop operations that used to define an ordinary night out in this town. What replaced them clusters at either end: reservation-only spots like Noble Ace and Amorelia, or fast-turn, lower-overhead concepts like Truly Bagels, Small's and Nulu Poke.

El Matatan, which opened in June after owner Oscar Garcia moved his Cuban, Dominican and Mexico City menu from the city of Orange to a Laguna storefront, fits the casual side of that same split. It is one more full-service concept choosing to open here this year, which says something about confidence in the market, but it is not filling the exact niche Dizz's left behind either.

What This Means for an Ordinary Weeknight

If you have tried to grab dinner downtown in the last month, you already know why this matters. The Pageant of the Masters is in its back stretch right now, running nightly through September 4 with this year's production built around the theme "The Greatest of All Time," and the Festival of Arts fine art show that comes with every ticket runs through September 3. That is roughly three more weeks of Laguna Canyon Road traffic and a downtown core that fills up early most evenings.

What the last few months quietly gave you is more spread. A full sit-down dinner used to mean driving into the same few downtown blocks almost every time. Now North Laguna has its own dinner-house option in Truly Pizza, and South Laguna has both Small's Smash Club and Truly Bagels without anyone needing to drive toward Main Beach at all. That matters more than usual right now. Noble Ace and Nulu Poke, the two additions closest to Main Beach, are exactly where you'd expect to find a crowd while the Pageant is running. The ones that opened on either end of town are where you go to skip it.

That is worth knowing whether you are two years into living here or twenty. The restaurants filling Laguna's emptiest storefronts this year are not rebuilding what used to be there. They are betting on the two ends of the spectrum and leaving the middle for someone else to figure out.

If you are thinking about where in Laguna Beach these changes matter most for day-to-day living, or you're comparing this stretch of coast to other North County communities, the Laguna Beach neighborhood guide is a good place to keep exploring. And if you'd like to talk through what any of this means for your own plans here, Luxury Coastal Group is always happy to connect.