If you have been walking Coast Highway for more than a decade, the town you photograph and the town you actually live in have started to feel like two different places. The tourist photo is the same. The mile and a half between Main Beach and Aliso Creek is not.
Between March and July of 2026, a forty-nine-year dinner institution closed, a corner that had been dark since early 2025 reopened as a Hollywood-style supper club, a South Coast Highway pizzeria became a bagel shop, and a Costa Mesa family finally opened the Mexico City tasting room they had been trying to open since 2025. Fall is when the soft opens harden into habits. Here is the read.
One Coast Highway walk, six new stories
Start at Main Beach and walk south. Every address below is a place that either changed hands in 2026 or is about to. Nothing here is a rumor.
- 400 S. Coast Highway — Noble Ace. The Heisler Building had been empty since Bodega closed in early 2025. Noble Ace opened Monday, June 29th, 2026 from Chef Magellan Moore and Elizabeth and Tom Schreiber.
- 248 S. Coast Highway — Nalu Poke, Tea & Boba. Filling the vacated Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory space on Coast Highway across from Main Beach. 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. Forty-two years, one storefront.
- 858 S. Coast Highway — Amorelia Cocina Artesanal. The old San Shi Go "stilt" building. After nearly two years that included a heart-wrenching stall two weeks before the first planned opening, Amorelia is the phoenix rising. The new 185-seat restaurant is now in soft open in the old San Shi Go space. For decades, the long-standing Costa Mesa family-owned restaurant has specialized in Mexican cuisine. Now 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.
- 320 N. Coast Highway — Truly Pizza (North Laguna). The ever-popular Truly Pizza concept, which first opened in Dana Point in June 2023, will soon be bookending our lovely town with its pizza concept (NoLag at the former "3" restaurant space). Co-Owner Donna Baldwin told me that the NoLag concept will remain true to the Truly Pizza way, all seating outside.
- 31727 Coast Highway — Truly Bagels (South Laguna). The SoLag new concept, Truly Bagels, will not only feature a full range of bagel and baked good offerings but will serve as a commissary prep kitchen for doughs, sauces and more to fulfill both Pizza locations.
- 2794 S. Coast Highway — Small's Smashburger. The old Dizz's As Is. The 40-year Pitz-family run of Dizz's As Is ended on March 13, 2026. Several months ago, pro snowboarder Jordan Small set his sights on Laguna Beach's former Dizz's As Is to roost his 2nd smash burger location. A blow-up success in San Clemente, it was originally an idea he and his wife cooked up in their backyard during COVID.
Add El Matatan to that stretch as well. The popular Latin cuisine-styled El Matatan has finally made its way from the City of Orange to Orange County's darling, Laguna Beach. Owner Oscar Garcia began dinner soft openings a couple days ago in June 2026. A Dominican name for its moniker, Garcia's menu offers a lovely blend of Cuban, Dominican and authentic Mexico City fare. The GM is a familiar face: Oscar has snagged our beloved Omar from Carmelita's to be the residing GM.
Seven addresses. Roughly a mile and a half of asphalt. One season.
The Noble Ace question
Noble Ace deserves its own paragraph because the room is doing something Laguna has not tried in a while.
Open nightly beginning at 4:30 p.m., the restaurant offers a modern American menu from Executive Chef Magellan Moore, who spent 12 years as head chef at Mastro's Ocean Club Newport Beach. Signature dishes include Short Rib Stroganoff with handmade pappardelle and Jumbo Beef Potstickers served with blue cheese fondue and a beet and chive salad. The cocktail menu features drinks such as a cantaloupe and olive oil martini and a mezcal cucumber Collins. A wine locker program is also in the works, allowing guests to store bottles on-site for future visits.
The design brief is not subtle. Their overall vibe is Old Hollywood, so think brass, dark green, tangerine, and velvet accents, but also coastal. The space offers several distinct dining areas, each with its own atmosphere. The restaurant seats up to 150 guests. The Heisler Building is a 6,654-square-foot property in the heart of Downtown Laguna Beach, leased to Noble Ace by L.A.-based Pegasus Investments, who purchased the iconic space in 2023 from longtime Laguna Beach resident Sam Goldstein for $16.5 million.
The comp Schreiber offered a reporter is worth holding onto because it explains the whole bet: "This is like if Hillstone and Mastro's had a baby." If you have wondered why the corner across from Hotel Laguna sat dark for eighteen months, it was not for lack of interest. It was waiting for an operator willing to swing at that comp.
What quietly left
The openings get the press. The closures shape the block.
For anyone who has watched Coast Highway for the last decade, that is the read. The forty-year dinner institutions are not being replaced by other forty-year dinner institutions. They are being replaced by chef-driven concepts, counter-service daytime plays, and the occasional swing-for-the-fences project like Noble Ace.
The count from local reporter Diane Armitage: in 2025 alone, fifteen new food and beverage concept openings were announced, alongside four "coming soon" announcements. Seven F&B concepts were also lost in 2025. The 2025 openings skewed to coffeehouses, ice cream, and counter-service formats, with full-service restaurants representing a smaller portion of new supply than in prior years.
Read that alongside what closed and the shape of the shift is clear. Dizz's, forty-nine years. Rocky Mountain Chocolate, forty-two. Bodega and Skyloft, dark since January 2025. What's emerging in Laguna Beach isn't a rejection of hospitality, but a recalibration of risk. By the trending numbers alone, this recalibration is one that increasingly favors shorter daytime stays, faster turns and lower operational exposure.
If you have lived here twenty years, this is the sentence to sit with. The evenings you remember are not the evenings your block is being built for now. Noble Ace and Amorelia are the two counterweights.
A fall route worth actually doing
Set aside a Thursday. Preferably the first Thursday of the month.
- 4:30 p.m. Park once, north end. Start at Truly Pizza's new North Laguna spot at the old "3" if the doors are open, or Urth next door if they are not.
- 5:30 p.m. Walk south to the Heisler Building. Look for the piano through the window at Noble Ace. Sunday through Thursday hours run 4:30 to 10 p.m., and Friday and Saturday 4:30 to 11 p.m.
- 6:00 p.m. Cross to Nalu Poke, Tea & Boba next to Better Buzz. Notice the storefront. It has been Rocky Mountain Chocolate since Reagan's second term.
- 6:30 to 9:00 p.m. First Thursdays Art Walk. A festive cultural evening on the first Thursday of every month from 6pm to 9pm. Free trolley service runs throughout the evening linking member gallery locations. Over 40 galleries participate in the evening, offering artist receptions, demonstrations and live music. The night includes free admission to the Laguna Art Museum. The next three dates are September 3, October 1, and November 5.
- 9:15 p.m. Amorelia at 858 S. Coast Highway for a late seating. Think raw bar, wagyu, uni and five seating areas. The entry-level floor has been outfitted with a showpiece bar and a significantly sizable wine structure, carrying handcrafted design details from Mexico throughout. Reservations run through the restaurant or resy.
Any resident who runs that route once in September will end October with a clearer sense of which of these rooms is going to make it to 2027 than any tourist column will offer.
The Sawdust footnote worth flagging
One more thing to put on the fall calendar. South Laguna's AhbA, owned by Nick Bennett, has announced its third restaurant, a seasonal foray with the Sawdust Festival. AhbA first landed in Laguna Beach in 2019, just months before the pandemic closed us all down. It emerged during COVID with a rousing take-out program and, eventually, a next-door acquisition that became a speakeasy called Helen's. AhbA is expanding to a third location at the Sawdust Festival grounds. Winter Fantasy season at the Sawdust grounds is when residents who avoid the summer crowds actually go back. Watch that footprint this fall.
Also worth watching: the former Evan's Gourmet, remembered as the longtime Cafe Zoolu neighborhood hangout, is transforming to Bar ízi in a matter of weeks. If you had a birthday at Zoolu at any point in the last twenty years, you are going to have feelings about that doorway.
Why any of this matters for a resident
The Coast Highway you learned to drive is being re-priced, one lease at a time. Fall is the quiet season when the operators who took summer swings find out whether locals will keep the lights on after the visitors leave. That is the referendum. Every one of the rooms above needs a Tuesday-night regular more than it needs a Saturday-night line.
If you are the kind of resident who reads the shift on the ground before it shows up in Zillow tiles, the map above is where your neighborhood is being rewritten. The stretch from 320 North to 2794 South is the current thesis. If those seven rooms are still open next spring, the recalibration held. If two of them are dark, the town told the operators something different.
If any of this makes you curious about how a market that reworks its restaurants in one summer is reworking its blocks, the team at Erich Redder reads that block the same way we read a listing. Schedule a Consultation and we will walk your stretch of Coast Highway with you.
