Laguna Beach's New Restaurants: What's Actually Open and What's Still Just a Sign in the Window

"This is like if Hillstone and Mastro's had a baby." That's how Elizabeth Schreiber described Noble Ace, the supper club she and Chef Magellan Moore opened this summer in the long-dark Heisler Building. It's a good line, and it's been repeated in every roundup of Laguna's restaurant year. What those roundups tend to skip is the second half of the story: not every name on the list has actually opened a door yet.

If you've been following Coast Highway's restaurant turnover since spring, you've read some version of the same seven names bundled together as one wave of change. By September, that wave has split into two very different timelines. Five kitchens are running businesses you can walk into tonight. Two are sitting almost exactly where the July press coverage left them. That gap, not the headline count of new openings, is the part worth knowing if you actually live here and want dinner this week.

The Storefronts That Went Dark Together

For most of 2025, four addresses that Laguna residents pass constantly sat empty at the same time: the Heisler Building across from Main Beach, the elevated corner space at 858 South Coast known for decades as San Shi Go, the shuttered Ti Amo building in South Laguna, and the eclectic old Dizz's As Is south of downtown. Any one of those going quiet would have drawn attention on its own. All four together felt like the town was holding its breath, and a fifth long-vacant space soon joined the list.

Between March and July of this year, that breath let out. But it let out unevenly, and the order it happened in tells you more about how this town actually operates than the simple fact that new restaurants arrived.

What You Can Actually Sit Down At Tonight

Five of these openings are confirmed, staffed, and taking guests as of now. Here's what replaced what, and roughly when it happened.

Noble Ace is the one everyone's talking about, and for reasons that go beyond the piano bar and the Golden Age Hollywood design from Ralitsa Kombakis. The team runs deep for a single-restaurant opening: Hillari Galindo came in as General Manager after two decades split between Mastro's Ocean Club and Red O in Newport Beach, and Danny Reyes returned as Assistant GM after starting his Laguna career at Odessa. That's the kind of hiring you do when you're planning to stay open for years, not just survive a summer.

Two miles south, the reshuffle looked nothing alike. Dizz's As Is closed for good on March 13 after the Pitz family ran it for more than 40 years, since Marcel Pitz founded it in 1977. What moved in wasn't another continental menu. Small's Smash Club, a second location for professional snowboarder Jordan Small's San Clemente burger concept, kept the ocean-view room and the existing liquor license and opened to a line that stretched through its first weekend. Same building, an entirely different bet on what a Friday night in Laguna is worth to a diner.

Amorelia had the roughest road to opening. The Mexico City-focused concept from the Seretti family, whose original restaurant has run in Costa Mesa for decades, was originally set to open in the old San Shi Go space back in 2025, then lost its lead chef within weeks of that planned launch. It's open now, with a raw bar and a wine program that's made it enough of a draw that its World Cup viewing parties reportedly pulled in NBA Hall of Famer Ray Allen and Mark Cuban.

The Two Addresses Still Where They Were in July

Here's where the story most people have read gets incomplete. Two of the most anticipated names from this same reshuffle haven't opened, and there's no evidence either is close.

Truly Bagels, the counter-service sibling to Truly Pizza planned for the long-shuttered Ti Amo building at 31727 Coast Highway, filed plans for a new construction restaurant under 2,000 square feet back in November. Orange County Health Department plan review records marked that application "unable to approve" as of January, and nothing in the record since has shown a resubmission moving forward. If you live between Aliso and Three Arch and have been waiting for a walkable breakfast option since Ti Amo went dark, that wait doesn't have a new end date yet.

Bar ízi, the small plates concept taking over the old Evan's Gourmet space at Glenneyre and Thalia, has a more specific target: an end-of-August or early-September debut, as reported in late July. September is here now. A lead server listing for the restaurant was still active in the last week, describing a small crew still being assembled. That's not usually where a restaurant sits once it's already serving dinner. It may open any day. It has not opened yet.

The Order Nobody Would Have Predicted

The obvious assumption is that simpler concepts open faster. A bagel counter and a small plates bar should, in theory, beat a full supper club with a hired GM, a designed interior, and a chef's table to opening day. That's not what happened here.

The two most complicated builds on this list, Noble Ace with its piano bar and multi-room layout, and Amorelia with its 185-seat raw bar and custom Mexico-sourced finishes, both opened months ago. The two simplest formats, a bagel counter and a small plates room, are the ones still stuck. Local food coverage spent part of last year describing a citywide shift toward shorter, faster-turn, lower-overhead concepts as the safer bet for operators. That may be true as a broader trend. It hasn't been true for these two specific addresses, where the harder, more expensive build got its doors open first.

What This Actually Changes About Your Week

The useful split here isn't geography, it's service model, and it's worth knowing before you plan a night out.

If you want a reservation-required dinner, Noble Ace and Amorelia are both running and both worth booking ahead for, especially on a Friday or Saturday. If you want something you can walk into without planning, Truly Pizza, Nalu Poke, and Small's are your real options, though Truly Pizza's tables still go fast enough that showing up without a reservation on a weekend is a gamble.

If your routine has included waiting on a South Laguna bagel counter, keep waiting. Nothing in the public record since January suggests that opening is imminent. And if you've seen Bar ízi mentioned as though it's already serving small plates on Glenneyre, treat that as aspiration rather than fact until you see it confirmed. The gap between "targeting an opening" and "open" has real consequences when you're the one driving over expecting a table.

This is the kind of granular, changes-by-the-week detail that's easy to miss if you're reading the summer's coverage as one story instead of two timelines running at different speeds. It's also the kind of detail that matters if you're weighing what daily life actually looks like in a place before deciding to put down roots here.

If you're already thinking about what it means to live in Laguna Beach long term, or you're curious how a shifting local dining scene fits into the larger picture of buying or selling here, Danielle Wilson and the Coastal OC Real Estate Group know this coastline block by block. Work With Us when you're ready to talk about it.