If you walked Coast Highway in March and again in July, you passed at least four addresses where a longtime name had come down and a new sign had gone up. The Pageant of the Masters is running its 2026 season under the title "The Greatest of All Time," and the corridor underneath it just quietly held its own referendum on what greatest means for a Laguna dinner room.
The story locals are missing while shuttling guests to Irvine Bowl is not that new restaurants opened. It is which forty-year rooms closed, which shuttered addresses finally have tenants, and what kind of operator is willing to sign a lease here now.
The mile-and-a-half that turned over
Between the old Dizz's building near Aliso Creek and the Heisler Building at 400 South, roughly a mile and a half of Coast Highway has changed hands in a single season. The pattern is easier to read as a list than as a paragraph.
| Address | Former tenant | New concept | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2794 S Pacific Coast Hwy | Dizz's As Is (closed March 13, 2026) | Small's Smash Club | Open |
| 858 S Coast Hwy | San Shi Go | Amorelia | Soft open |
| 400 S Coast Hwy (Heisler Building) | Bodega | Noble Ace | Summer 2026 |
| 320 N Coast Hwy | "3" | Truly Pizza | 2026 |
| 31727 Coast Hwy | Ti Amo | Truly Bagels | 2026 |
| 248 S Coast Hwy | Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory | Nalu Poke, Tea & Boba | Opening |
| South Laguna (near AHBA) | Thai restaurant space | Empire Oyster Raw Bar | Opening |
| S Coast Hwy | Former Dominican-Latin concept expansion | El Matatan | Open (June 11) |
Two of those closures are worth naming specifically. Dizz's As Is closed on March 13, and had been owned and operated by the Pitz family for more than 40 years after being founded in 1977 by Marcel Pitz. The Heisler Building at 400 South, meanwhile, had been vacant since Bodega closed in early 2025. Two forty-year corridor institutions, one long-shuttered flagship space, all resolved inside six months.
What is actually replacing them
Small's Smash Club took over the former Dizz's home at 2794 S Pacific Coast Hwy, which closed permanently on March 13, 2026. The new tenant kept the existing bar and liquor license and the ocean views, and its parent brand was founded by professional snowboarder Jordan Small, who opened his first brick-and-mortar in San Clemente in 2025 after starting the concept as a backyard operation during the pandemic. The full menu remains what it was in San Clemente: smash burgers in three sizes, beef tallow fries, onion rings.
Amorelia is the most ambitious of the group. The new 185-seat restaurant is in soft open in the old San Shi Go space at 858 S. Coast Highway. The Seretti family's long-standing Costa Mesa restaurant has specialized in Mexican cuisine for decades, and owner Gloria Seretti and her son Daniel Paniagua have taken this first expansion to a Mexico City-centric finer dining focus.
Noble Ace is the outlier. The restaurant describes itself as a Golden Age Hollywood-inspired speakeasy restaurant and bar, and is the brainchild of Chef Magellan Moore of Mastro's Ocean Club along with Elizabeth and Tom Schreiber. Noble Ace is due to open Summer 2026 at the historic Heisler Building.
El Matatan opened its doors for lunch on June 11, 2026, with owner Oscar Garcia working his crew through the lunch service after a few days of dinner soft opens. The name is Dominican, and the menu offers a blend of Cuban, Dominican and authentic Mexico City fare. Omar, previously at Carmelita's, is the residing GM.
The two Truly concepts bookend the town. Truly Pizza is opening in North Laguna at 320 N. Coast Highway in the former "3" space, and Truly Bagels is taking the long-shuttered Ti Amo building at 31727 Coast Highway in South Laguna, both from the team that opened Truly Pizza in Dana Point in June 2023. And on the block across from Main Beach, Nalu Poke, Tea & Boba is arriving next to Better Buzz Coffee at 248 S. Coast Highway, in a storefront that Rocky Mountain Chocolate has held since 1984, when it was one of the company's first outliers from the Durango, Colorado headquarters.
The pattern under the pattern
Read the list twice and something surfaces that no single press release will tell you. Three of the eight are Mexico or Latin-forward. Three are daytime-friendly counter or single-item concepts. Only Noble Ace is a full-service dinner-house play in the classic Coast Highway mold.
Diane Armitage's tracking at Best of Laguna Beach is the closest thing this town has to a longitudinal dataset on its own dining economy. Her 2025 count included 15 new food-and-beverage openings and seven closures, and her read on the direction of travel is worth stating plainly. What is emerging in Laguna Beach is not a rejection of hospitality but a recalibration of risk, one that increasingly favors shorter daytime stays, faster turns and lower operational exposure.
That is the sentence to hold onto through August. The corridor is not shrinking. It is trading long full-service dinner shifts for counter concepts, single-item shops, and lunch-forward Latin rooms. The two rooms that just closed after forty years each ran the older model. Most of what replaced them does not.
How to actually use August around it
If you live here, you already know the Festival calendar. Festival of Arts and Pageant of the Masters run July 7 through September 4, 2026, with volunteers recreating living paintings each evening. The 2026 production title is "The Greatest of All Time," the Pageant's answer to what is named one of the top art festivals in the nation.
What you might not have on the calendar yet is the free Sunday evening series at Bluebird Park, which pairs well with a walk to any of the new openings after. Music in the Park's 2026 schedule includes Spencer the Gardner on August 2 (indie surf salsa), Missus Jones on August 9 (an Amy Winehouse tribute), and Rose's Pawn Shop on August 16 (American roots), with sets starting at 5:00 p.m. No dogs at Bluebird per LBMC 6.16.020, no smoking per 7.40.030, no merchandise per 18.04.015, no drones per 7.80.
A workable August rhythm for a resident who does not want to fight Pageant traffic:
- Sunday early evening at Bluebird for the concert, then dinner at Small's or El Matatan on the south end of Coast, both of which are set up for the shorter turn Armitage described.
- Weeknight Pageant seats, with a lighter pre-show at Nalu Poke across from Main Beach or a proper Mexico City tasting menu at Amorelia if you want to make the night the meal.
- Reserve one Saturday for Noble Ace once the opening date lands. The Heisler Building is the one address in this whole cycle where the new operator is betting on the old model.
The Pageant theme, read against the street
There is a tidy joke in the timing that only locals will catch. Longtime Pageant Director Diane Challis Davy built the 2026 show around a deliberately unanswerable prompt about the greatest work in art history. A block below Irvine Bowl, the corridor spent the same six months answering a parallel question about restaurants, and the answer looks almost nothing like what the previous generation of Coast Highway would have picked.
The greatest room, by the standard the last forty years measured, was the independent full-service dinner house with a bar, a liquor license, and a family name on the lease. Dizz's ran that play for four decades. Bodega closed after a full run in the Heisler Building. What is going in behind them is faster, lighter, more counter-driven, and more Latin-forward. Only Noble Ace is reaching for the older idiom.
Whether that shift reads as loss or as evolution depends on which corner of town you moved to and when. For a homeowner deciding where to walk their guests this August, the practical takeaway is simpler. The Coast Highway you are describing to visitors is not the one that existed eighteen months ago, and the addresses worth pointing to have moved.
If you own a Laguna Beach home and are thinking about what the corridor's turnover means for your own timing, Ayumi Real Estate is happy to talk it through. Request a complimentary home valuation and consultation.
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