"This is like if Hillstone and Mastro's had a baby." That's how Elizabeth Schreiber described the pricing and format of Noble Ace, the restaurant she and Chef Magellan Moore spent a decade planning before finally opening in the Heisler Building this June. It's a good line, and it's also a clue. Read against everything else that filled Laguna's dark storefronts this year, it points to something the drive-by version of this story misses.
For most of 2025, four of the most-watched addresses on Coast Highway sat empty. The Heisler Building across from Main Beach. The stilt-house perch at 858 South Coast. The Ti Amo building in South Laguna. The old Dizz's As Is space south of downtown. Any one of those going dark would have been a story on its own. All four at once felt like the town was holding its breath. Between March and July 2026, every one of them turned back on. The interesting part isn't that Laguna got new restaurants. It's that the concepts filling those addresses split cleanly into two different categories, and the split tells you something real about how this stretch of coast is being rebuilt.
Four Addresses, One Season
Start with the building that's been vacant the longest. The Heisler Building at 400 S. Coast Highway had been dark since Bodega and Skyloft closed in early 2025. In June, Noble Ace opened there, an Old Hollywood-inspired dinner house from Schreiber and Moore, who spent 12 years as head chef at Mastro's Ocean Club in Newport Beach before this. The room seats around 150, runs nightly from 4:30, and stays open until 11 on Fridays and Saturdays.
Down the highway, the old San Shi Go stilt building at 858 S. Coast Highway spent nearly two years empty before Amorelia moved in this spring. The Costa Mesa family behind it, led by owner Gloria Seretti and her son Daniel Paniagua, had built their name on Mexican cuisine at their original location. Their first expansion took a harder turn: a 185-seat, Mexico City-centric dining room in the space overlooking the water.
Further south still, the Ti Amo building at 31727 Coast Highway had sat shuttered for years. It reopened this summer as Truly Bagels, a daytime counter concept from the same team behind Dana Point's Truly Pizza. That team also opened a full-service Truly Pizza in the old "3" restaurant space at 320 N. Coast Highway, with a ribbon cutting on June 11, 2026, after doors first opened in May. The pizza landed at No. 4 on the 2026 edition of 50 Top Pizza USA within weeks, with its Umami Mushroom Pizza named Pizza of the Year, an honor co-founder Donna Baldwin said the brand has now earned three years running.
The fourth address is the one locals felt hardest. Dizz's As Is closed permanently on March 13, 2026, ending a 40-year run under the Pitz family that started when Marcel Pitz opened it in 1977. The rack of lamb and raspberry duck are gone. In their place, Small's Smash Club opened in June, a smash burger concept from professional snowboarder Jordan Small that started as a backyard operation during the pandemic before becoming a brick and mortar in San Clemente in 2025. Small's kept the ocean view and the existing liquor license, and the opening weekend line stretched through the weekend.
One more space changed hands quietly enough that it's easy to miss. Nulu Poke Tea & Boba moved into 248 S. Coast Highway, across from Main Beach, taking over the spot Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory had held since 1984.
The Line That Runs Through All of It
Line these up and a pattern shows up that a single restaurant review never would. Noble Ace, Amorelia, and the north-end Truly Pizza are full-service, reservation-driven, built for a night out. Truly Bagels, Small's Smash Club, and Nulu Poke are counter-service or bar-forward, built for a fast weeknight stop with no reservation required.
What makes this more than a coincidence is that one operator drew the line on purpose. The Truly Pizza team didn't open one restaurant in Laguna this year. They opened two, on opposite ends of town, with opposite formats. The full-service pizza concept went to the more visible north-end address. The counter-service bagel shop went south, into a space that had been dark for years. Same brand, same ownership group, two different bets depending on which end of Coast Highway they were building on. That's not an accident of real estate availability. It's a read on where a full dinner service makes sense in this town and where a faster, lower-overhead format does.
"Beach communities have an energy you just can't replicate," Truly Pizza co-founder Donna Baldwin told the Laguna Beach Independent, describing why the brand keeps expanding into coastal towns rather than inland ones.
What the Full Year Says
Zoom out from this one season and the pattern holds. Diane Armitage, who tracks the local food scene through Best of Laguna Beach, counted 15 new food and beverage openings against seven closures across all of 2025. That's a ratio worth sitting with. Nearly the same number of concepts closed as the town gained new ones, and the newer arrivals skewed toward shorter daytime hours and faster table turns rather than the long full-service dinner shifts that defined the last generation of Coast Highway restaurants.
That's the backdrop this summer's reopenings landed on. The town isn't simply adding restaurants. It's replacing a chunk of its old full-service inventory with faster, lower-risk formats, while still making room for two or three operators willing to bet on the slower, reservation-driven model. Noble Ace and Amorelia are the exceptions that prove the rule. Everything else filling these storefronts this year is built for a quicker in-and-out.
How This Actually Plays Out on a Weeknight
If you live here, the practical version of this story is simpler than the trend line.
- Want a sit-down dinner that requires planning: Noble Ace or Amorelia. Both take reservations, both run a full evening service, and both are worth booking ahead rather than walking up.
- Want a fast, no-reservation stop on a Tuesday: Truly Bagels in South Laguna, Nulu Poke across from Main Beach, or Small's Smash Club at the old Dizz's address. None of these are built around a long evening. All three are built around showing up and eating.
- Want pizza with a little more ceremony: the north-end Truly Pizza location splits the difference, full-service but casual, and it's the one earning outside recognition this year.
The geography matters too. Noble Ace and Small's Smash Club sit roughly a mile and a half apart, which means the entire span between this summer's most formal opening and its most casual one is a walkable evening rather than a drive. If you're already walking between Heisler Park and downtown, Noble Ace sits right on that route. If you're headed toward South Laguna's coves, Truly Bagels and the old Ti Amo corner are now part of that walk in a way they haven't been in years.
Why the Split Is Worth Tracking
None of this is really about any single menu. It's about what four simultaneous reopenings reveal when nobody's telling you to read them together. A town's restaurant mix is one of the clearest signals of how operators think the local economy actually works. This year, the operators betting on Laguna chose two different models depending on the address, and one of them, the Truly Pizza team, made that choice explicitly by opening both formats themselves. That's not a story about food. It's a story about which parts of Coast Highway can support a long dinner service right now and which parts reward a faster turn, and it's the kind of detail that only shows up if you're paying attention to the whole street rather than one new opening at a time.
That's the same habit of paying attention to the whole picture that guides how Kim Bibb tracks this coastline for clients, whether the question is where to eat on a Tuesday or what's actually happening a few blocks over. If you're curious what else has changed in Laguna Beach lately, or want a second set of eyes on anything happening in the neighborhood, reach out anytime.
