Coast Highway Just Swapped Four Restaurants in One Summer. Here's the Pattern Nobody's Naming.

"This is like if Hillstone and Mastro's had a baby," is how co-owner Schreiber described Noble Ace to a reporter this spring, and it's the kind of line that only makes sense once you've walked the block it's sitting on. Noble Ace took over the Heisler Building at 400 South Coast Highway, across from Main Beach, a space that had been dark since Bodega and Skyloft closed in January 2025. Co-owner Elizabeth Schreiber has said she and Chef Magellan Moore first worked together at Mastro's Ocean Club twelve years ago, long before the two decided to open something of their own, a Golden Age Hollywood-style speakeasy with a piano bar downstairs and a reservation-only chef's table upstairs.

Now that Labor Day has passed and the tourist crowds have thinned, it's worth taking stock of what actually changed on this street while everyone was busy going to the beach. Four long-vacant or newly-vacated storefronts got new tenants between March and July, and once you line up who moved into which address, a pattern shows up that's more useful than any single restaurant review: Coast Highway isn't turning over randomly. It's sorting itself into two different kinds of eating, and knowing which kind you're standing in front of will save you a wasted trip.

Four Addresses, One Stretch of Highway

Three of the spaces that changed hands this year had been sitting empty for a while, in one case for years. The fourth turned over almost overnight when a 40-year institution finally closed.

The Heisler Building had been dark for over a year before Noble Ace opened there on June 29. Two miles south, Dizz's As Is, run by the Pitz family since 1977, closed for good on March 13 after more than four decades on Pacific Coast Highway. Small's Smash Club, a burger concept founded by professional snowboarder Jordan Small, moved into that space within months, keeping the existing ocean-view bar and liquor license rather than building one from scratch.

In between, two spaces that had sat empty even longer finally found tenants. The old San Shi Go building at 858 South Coast Highway, the one locals call the "stilt house" for how it perches over the highway, is now Amorelia, a Mexico City-inspired dining room from Costa Mesa restaurateur Gloria Seretti and her son Daniel Paniagua. And in South Laguna, the long-shuttered Ti Amo building at 31727 Coast Highway reopened as Truly Bagels, a daytime counter-service spinoff of Truly Pizza, the same team that opened a full-service pizza restaurant at 320 North Coast Highway in the former "3" space, next to Urth Caffé and across from the Laguna Art Museum.

The Split: Downtown Bets Big, the Ends of Town Bet Fast

Read those five openings side by side and a rule starts to emerge. The spaces closest to the downtown core and Main Beach corridor are the ones getting the expensive, reservation-driven bets. The spaces toward the edges of town are getting faster, cheaper, lower-overhead concepts built around counter service and quick turns.

Noble Ace fits the downtown pattern exactly: a wine list, a piano, a chef's table, hours that don't start until 4:30 in the afternoon. Amorelia does too, opening daily from 5 to 10 p.m. as a dinner-only reservation destination. Both are full-service builds with the staffing and hours that come with that kind of commitment.

Truly Bagels and Small's Smash Club sit on the other end of the ledger. Truly Bagels is a walk-in, order-at-the-counter operation built for a quick breakfast rather than a planned evening out. Small's serves a tight menu of smash burgers, tallow fries, and onion rings, the kind of format that turns tables fast and doesn't need a reservations system. When Small's opened in June, the line stretched through the entire opening weekend, which says something about how much pent-up daytime and early-evening demand had been sitting unmet at that address.

Here's how the addresses actually line up:

This isn't a perfect north-south split. Nulu Poke Tea & Boba just moved into the old Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory space at 248 South Coast Highway, right across from Main Beach in the heart of downtown, and it's a quick-service tea and poke counter, not a dinner house. Bouchée Patisserie, a French-inspired bakery serving pastries and coffee near the Montage's porte-cochere, opened back in March and leans daytime too, even though the Montage itself is a full-service resort. And South Laguna picked up its own reservation-style exception this year in Empire Oyster Raw Bar, an omakase spot that opened a half block from AhbA. The geography bends. The service-type split doesn't. What's actually happening is that daytime and counter-service concepts are spreading everywhere, while the handful of true full-service dinner bets are concentrated in the addresses with the most foot traffic and the longest track record of supporting a kitchen through a slow Tuesday in January.

That tracks with what local food writer Diane Armitage has been tracking at Best of Laguna Beach, where she counted 15 new food and beverage openings against seven closures across 2025, with the newer concepts consistently skewing toward shorter daytime hours and faster table turns compared to the full-service dinner houses that used to define this stretch. Four of the biggest turnovers in 2026 confirm the same read: operators are still willing to gamble on a marquee corner, but the safer money is going into formats that don't need someone to sit down for two hours.

What This Actually Means for a Weeknight

If you already live here, the useful takeaway isn't "there are new restaurants." It's knowing which kind of night you're planning for before you leave the house.

• Want a reservation-worthy dinner without driving out of town? Noble Ace and Amorelia are both new full-service anchors, one at each end of the downtown stretch, and both book up on weekends.
• Want something you can walk into without planning ahead? Small's Smash Club, Truly Bagels, and Truly Pizza (which is open from 11 a.m. and doesn't require a reservation to get a table) all cover that.
• Craving a quick bite near Main Beach before or after a walk? Nulu Poke and Bouchée Patisserie both fill that daytime gap that didn't really exist on this stretch a year ago.

Worth knowing if you're trying to string a few of these together into one evening: the walk from Noble Ace at 400 South Coast Highway down to Small's Smash Club at 2794 South Pacific Coast Highway is about a mile and a half, which is roughly the entire span of this year's turnover in a single stroll down the highway.

The Season That Just Wrapped

All of this landed in the same year Laguna marked the Sawdust Art Festival's 60th anniversary, with more than 180 local artists and a food lineup that expanded well past the usual fair fare, including Wagyu burgers from AhbA and dishes from Taco Loco under longtime Laguna cook Gonzo Rebollar. The Pageant of the Masters ran alongside it with a 2026 production called "The Greatest of All Time," built, as longtime director Diane Challis Davy explained, around the idea that there's no single answer to that question, just forty works that could each make the case.

Both festivals have wrapped for the season, but First Thursdays Art Walk keeps going year-round on the first Thursday of every month, with the Laguna Art Museum opening free from 5 to 9 p.m. That's worth remembering now that the summer crowds are gone, because Truly Pizza sits directly across the highway from the museum, which makes an early dinner and a stroll through the galleries an easy pairing on nights when the town feels like it's actually yours again.

The restaurants that opened this year while the tourists were distracted by the festivals are the ones that get to prove themselves now, in the quieter months, to the people who'll actually be back in January.

If you're weighing a move to this stretch of coast, or you already live here and are curious what a property near any of these corners is actually worth in today's market, Tony Salay Real Estate Group has been walking this same highway for decades and is glad to talk through it. Contact Us.