If you drove Coast Highway in early 2025 and again in June 2026, you passed at least four different restaurants sitting where longtime institutions used to be. This is the summer Laguna's dining spine turned over faster than the Pageant swaps tableaux, and it happens to coincide with a Festival of Arts season built around the theme "The Greatest of All Time." The overlap is worth walking.
Here is what actually shifted, block by block, and how to use the July-through-September calendar without buying a ticket to something you have already seen.
The Coast Highway turnover, north to south
The story on the ground is not "new restaurants opened." The story is which buildings changed hands, and what that says about who is betting on Laguna right now. Two forty-year institutions closed. One long-shuttered space finally has a tenant. The 40-year Pitz-family run of Dizz's As Is ended on March 13, 2026, and the Heisler Building has been empty since Bodega closed in early 2025.
Here is the current map, running north to south:
- Truly Pizza (North Laguna) — 320 N. Coast Highway, the former "3" space by Urth Caffe. The Dana Point original's first expansion.
- Nalu Poke, Tea & Boba — 248 S. Coast Highway, next to Better Buzz, in the space Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory occupied since 1984.
- Noble Ace — 400 S. Coast Highway, the historic Heisler Building. A "Golden Age Hollywood-inspired speakeasy" from Chef Magellan Moore of Mastro's Ocean Club with Elizabeth and Tom Schreiber, targeting a summer 2026 opening.
- Amorelia — 858 S. Coast Highway, the old San Shi Go stilt building. A 185-seat Mexico City–focused restaurant from the Seretti family, whose Costa Mesa original has been serving for decades.
- El Matatan — Cuban, Dominican, and Mexico City cooking from owner Oscar Garcia, expanded from the City of Orange, opened for lunch in June 2026. Omar from Carmelita's is the GM.
- Small's Smash Club — 2794 S. Pacific Coast Hwy, the former Dizz's As Is. Opened June 2026, second location after San Clemente. Founded by pro snowboarder Jordan Small, kept the ocean-view bar and liquor license from Dizz's.
- Truly Bagels (South Laguna) — 31727 Coast Highway, the long-shuttered former Ti Amo. Counter-service daytime concept from the Truly Pizza team.
- Empire Oyster Raw Bar — South Laguna, an omakase raw bar in the former Thai-restaurant space a half block from AHBA.
Read that list twice and a pattern surfaces: three of the eight are Mexico or Latin-forward, three are daytime-friendly counter or single-item concepts, and only one, Noble Ace, is a full-service dinner-house play in the classic Coast Highway mold. Diane Armitage's tracking at Best of Laguna Beach counted 15 new food-and-beverage openings across 2025 against seven closures, with newer concepts skewing toward shorter daytime service and faster turns rather than the long full-service dinner shifts that defined the last generation of Coast Highway.
If you have lived here long enough to remember ordering rack of lamb or raspberry duck at Dizz's, that shift is the news. The Pitz family ran that building for over 40 years after Marcel Pitz founded it in 1977. It is now a smash-burger counter with the same bar and the same view.
Why the Heisler Building matters
Noble Ace is worth its own paragraph because the Heisler Building sits at 400 S. Coast Highway, at the corner most out-of-town guests photograph first. That address had been dark since Bodega closed in early 2025. Chef Magellan Moore is coming from Mastro's Ocean Club, and Elizabeth Schreiber told the Orange County Register the two had first worked together at Mastro's twelve years earlier while she was finishing her USC degree. The concept, described in press materials as a Golden Age Hollywood speakeasy, is the opposite bet from the smash-burger and bagel-counter openings a mile down the road. When it opens, the walk from Noble Ace at 400 South to Small's at 2794 South is roughly a mile and a half. That is the entire summer 2026 turnover in one stroll.
The Festival of Arts calendar, without the tourist framing
If you live here, you already know the Pageant is happening. What you might not know is that the 2026 production, "The Greatest of All Time," is longtime Pageant Director Diane Challis Davy's answer to a deliberately unanswerable prompt. In the Laguna Beach Independent, Davy laughed at the idea that art history has one clear "greatest," then explained the show was built by picking forty works that could each argue the case. The Volunteer Research Committee, now grown to 200 "art detectives," submitted candidate works. The final lineup includes Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Vermeer, Van Gogh, Monet, Picasso, Frida Kahlo, and Norman Rockwell.
The dates worth putting on the fridge:
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| July 7 | Chamber Night, the final dress rehearsal, known as locals' night |
| July 7 – Sept 3 | Festival of Arts Fine Art Show, 650 Laguna Canyon Road |
| July 9 – Sept 4 | Pageant of the Masters, nightly at 8:30 p.m., Irvine Bowl |
| July 12 | Family Art Day |
| July 19 | Cultural Arts Day |
| Aug 9 | Festival Runway Fashion Show |
| Aug 23 | Battle of the Arts |
Fine Art Show admission runs $5 to $15 depending on day and age. Pageant tickets start at $42. A Pageant ticket also doubles as a season pass to the Fine Art Show and includes same-day admission to Laguna Art-A-Fair, which is the piece most residents forget to use.
The Sawdust Festival opened the weekend before the Fine Art Show, so if your out-of-town guests only have one Saturday, you have three juried shows running simultaneously within walking distance of each other on Laguna Canyon Road.
A locals' cheat sheet for the season
Two moves separate residents from visitors this summer.
The first is the July 7 Chamber Night. It is the final dress rehearsal, tickets are for that night only, and seating is assigned first-come, first-served. It is the show at a discount, before the reviewers weigh in and before the first-week schedule pressure gets to the cast.
The second is using the Pageant ticket as a Fine Art Show season pass. Over the ten-week run, that math tilts heavily in your favor. Take a picnic in on a weekday afternoon, catch the live music on the grass, and skip the ticket line the tourists are standing in.
If you are hosting people between July and September, a defensible itinerary looks like this: coffee at Better Buzz, a walk past Nalu Poke and the Heisler Building to see whether Noble Ace has soft-opened, lunch at El Matatan or a smash burger at Small's, an afternoon at the Fine Art Show, dinner at Amorelia in the old stilt building, and the 8:30 Pageant curtain. Every stop on that route is a story the tourist guides have not caught up to yet.
What the turnover suggests about the town
Amorelia's owner Gloria Seretti told Best of Laguna Beach she had been looking for the right Laguna space for years before landing on the San Shi Go stilt building. Diane Armitage, who has covered the local dining scene for eighteen years, said she is fielding regular calls from national and regional operators asking what full-service Laguna space is available. The demand is there. What is changing is which slice of the day operators are willing to bet on.
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 Pageant this summer is asking which single work of art deserves the title of greatest. Coast Highway is quietly asking a smaller version of the same question, and giving a different answer every three blocks.
If you have lived in Laguna long enough to have opinions about which of these openings will still be here in five years, we would love to hear them. And if the turnover on your own block has you thinking about what your home is worth in a market this active, Emily Sells OC is glad to sit down for a conversation. Request a free home consultation and we will bring the local read to your kitchen table.
