The 1.5-Mile Stretch of Coast Highway That Turned Over Before Labor Day

If you drove Coast Highway in March and again last week, you passed at least four different restaurants sitting where longtime institutions used to be. Dizz's As Is closed after 40 years. The Heisler Building has been dark since Bodega left. San Shi Go's stilt-house is now a 185-seat dining room. And all of it is happening while Pageant of the Masters is running its 93rd consecutive season a mile up the canyon.

The summer story in Laguna Beach isn't that new restaurants opened. It's that the entire dinner spine of Coast Highway changed hands inside a single festival season, and you can walk the whole turnover between now and the Pageant's September 4 finale.

The Turnover, North to South

Start at the top of town. Noble Ace is due to open this summer inside the historic Heisler Building at 400 South Coast Highway, empty since Bodega closed in early 2025. The concept is a Golden Age Hollywood speakeasy from Chef Magellan Moore, previously of Mastro's Ocean Club, working with Elizabeth and Tom Schreiber. Just up the road at 320 N. Coast Highway, the former "3" restaurant space is being prepped as Truly Pizza's second location, a full-service expansion of the Dana Point original.

Head south a few blocks and you hit Nalu Poke, Tea & Boba at 248 S. Coast Highway, filling the space Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory occupied for four decades after opening there in 1984 as one of the company's earliest stores outside Durango. It sits next door to Better Buzz Coffee, which tells you what the block is becoming.

A little further south, at 858 S. Coast Highway, Amorelia is now in soft-open in the old San Shi Go stilt building. Owner Gloria Seretti and her son Daniel Paniagua brought their long-running Costa Mesa family restaurant here for a Mexico City–centric fine-dining format, with a raw bar on the east side and a wine structure built into the entry floor. It's their first expansion in decades.

Keep walking, and by the time you cross into South Laguna, you're at Small's Smash Club, which opened in June at 2794 S. Coast Highway in the former Dizz's As Is. Founded by pro snowboarder Jordan Small as a pandemic backyard experiment, its San Clemente original became the template. The Laguna location kept Dizz's ocean-view bar and liquor license and serves smash burgers, beef tallow fries, and onion rings. The opening weekend line stretched down the block.

Two more blocks south, El Matatan started dinner soft-opens in June, run by owner Oscar Garcia with Cuban, Dominican, and authentic Mexico City fare. Garcia hired Omar, formerly of Carmelita's, as GM. Down the coast at 31727 Coast Highway, the long-shuttered Ti Amo is being fitted out as Truly Bagels, a counter-service daytime concept from the Truly Pizza team. And in a former Thai space near AHBA, Empire Oyster Raw Bar is bringing an omakase raw-bar format to South Laguna.

That is the entire summer 2026 turnover in one stroll: Noble Ace to Small's is roughly a mile and a half.

Open Now vs. On the Way

Read the list twice and a pattern surfaces. Three of the eight concepts are Mexico or Latin-forward. Three are daytime-friendly counter or single-item formats. Only Noble Ace is a full-service dinner house in the classic Coast Highway mold. Diane Armitage's tracking at Best of Laguna Beach counted 15 new food-and-beverage openings against seven closures across 2025, with newer concepts skewing toward shorter daytime service and faster turns rather than long full-service dinner shifts.

If you've been eating on Coast Highway for 20 years, you already feel this. The town is getting more places to grab lunch and fewer places to sit for three hours.

The Festival Grid You Actually Need in August

You know the Pageant is running. You may not have looked at the August schedule against everything else happening in the canyon.

Pageant of the Masters performs nightly through September 4 at the 2,600-seat Irvine Bowl, 650 Laguna Canyon Road, at 8:30 p.m. The 2026 production, The Greatest of All Time, features works from Michelangelo, Velázquez, Monet, van Gogh, Picasso, Kahlo, and Rockwell. Tickets start at $42. In the Laguna Beach Independent, Pageant Director Diane Challis Davy laughed at the idea that art history has one clear "greatest," then explained the show was built by picking 40 works that could each argue the case.

A Pageant ticket also gets you unlimited general admission to the Festival of Arts fine-art show all summer, every visit. If you're a Laguna Beach resident, Festival of Arts admission is already free. So is admission for children five and under and for military.

If you'd rather skip the Pageant, the Passport to the Arts is $29 and covers one-time admission to Festival of Arts, Sawdust Art Festival at 935 Laguna Canyon Road, and Laguna Art-A-Fair at 777 Laguna Canyon Road, plus one all-day free parking pass at ACT V and trolley access. Sawdust is marking its 60th anniversary this year, with more than 180 artist booths, all Laguna Beach residents, working under eucalyptus canopy on sawdust-covered paths.

And then there's First Thursdays Art Walk on August 6, from 6 to 9 p.m. More than 40 galleries participate, Laguna Art Museum admission is free that night, and the trolley loops between gallery stops. If you've lived here a while, you know the summer First Thursdays feel different from the winter ones. August is peak.

"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," Amorelia's Gloria Seretti told Best of Laguna Beach. "It took a few years of looking for the perfect place, but I believe this place was meant to be for us."

That quote lands differently when you read it against the other side of the ledger: the 40-year Pitz-family run of Dizz's ending on March 13, the Heisler Building sitting empty for more than a year, Bodega, San Shi Go, Ti Amo, "3." Every one of the new operators is betting on a building that a longtime tenant vacated.

A Late-Summer Loop That Uses Both Sides of Town

If you want one evening that actually spans this summer, here's the order:

1. Park at the ACT V lot at 1900 Laguna Canyon Road by 4:30 p.m. It exists because canyon parking is impossible after 5 on Pageant nights, and the free Laguna Beach Trolley loops from ACT V into the Festival grounds and back.
2. Walk Sawdust first while the light is still on the eucalyptus. The booths thin out fastest between 4 and 6.
3. Cross to the Festival of Arts grounds. If you're a resident, show ID at the gate. Grab a glass at Terra Wine Bar or Intermission.
4. Take your Irvine Bowl seat before 8:30. Bring binoculars. The tableaux read differently in the back row than the front.
5. After the 10 p.m. curtain, trolley back to ACT V and drive south. Small's Smash Club and El Matatan are both open late enough to end the night in South Laguna, which used to mean Dizz's and now doesn't.

Do it on the first Thursday of the month and you can stack First Thursdays into the front of the loop by trolleying into the gallery district before Sawdust.

What the Turnover Actually Says

Two forty-year institutions closed this year. One long-empty landmark building finally has a tenant. Three of the eight new concepts are Latin. Three are counter-service. The town is rebalancing what it serves and when it's open.

For a Laguna Beach homeowner, the practical read isn't which restaurant to try first. It's that the buildings you've walked past for two decades are turning over inside a single festival season, and the operators taking them on are national and regional restaurant groups who called Diane Armitage asking about available Laguna spaces. That's a different demand signal than the town has felt in a while, and it shows up in what buyers ask about when they call us about a home two blocks off Coast Highway.

The Pageant closes September 4. The Sawdust wraps late August. By the time both go dark, the last few coming-soon signs on Coast Highway will probably be open doors. If you want to see what the next chapter of Laguna's dinner spine looks like, this is the walk to take before Labor Day.

If you're thinking about what your Laguna Beach home is worth in a summer where the neighborhood around it is visibly changing, the Hesley Team can put a real number on it. Request Your Home Valuation and we'll walk the block with you.