For most of the last decade, three buildings on Coast Highway carried the identity of the town's dining scene without doing much to earn it any given year. Dizz's As Is had been in the Pitz family since 1977. San Shi Go's stilt building had been a sushi fixture for a generation. The Heisler Building, a designated historic address at the mouth of Forest Avenue, had been Bodega until early 2025 and dark since.
By June 2026, all three had turned over. The operators moving in are not, on balance, replacing what left. They are running a different kind of restaurant.
The Three Addresses That Reset This Spring
Dizz's closed on March 13, 2026, after more than forty years of continental-menu dinner service under the Pitz family. The building at 2794 S Pacific Coast Highway is now Small's Smash Club, taking over the former Dizz's As Is space as its second location after debuting in San Clemente in 2025. Small's kept the existing bar and liquor license, the ocean views, and built its menu around smash burgers, beef tallow fries, and onion rings. The Orange County Register put the target opening at May 1, and the grand-opening line stretched down the block through its first weekend in June.
The San Shi Go stilt building at 858 S Coast Highway is now Amorelia. The 185-seat restaurant went into soft open in late March 2026 after nearly two years of delays that included a heart-wrenching stall two weeks before the original planned opening. The Seretti family had been running a Mexican restaurant in Costa Mesa for decades before this, their first expansion. Owner Gloria Seretti and her son, Daniel Paniagua, aimed the Laguna location at a Mexico City–centric finer dining focus.
"I knew for years that I needed to be in Laguna Beach because I wanted to expand to more and this is THE creative place you do that. It took a few years of looking for the perfect place, but I believe this place was meant to be for us. I knew it from the start."
The Heisler Building is the slowest of the three to fill. Vacant since Bodega closed in early 2025, it is now committed to Noble Ace, a Golden Age Hollywood–inspired speakeasy from Chef Magellan Moore of Mastro's Ocean Club and partners Elizabeth and Tom Schreiber. The opening is set for summer 2026 at 400 S Coast Highway. As of mid-July it has not yet cut a ribbon.
Read together, the three replacements skew in the same direction. A forty-year full-service dinner house is now a counter-forward burger bar. A stilt-building sushi room is now a Mexico City chef's-menu concept with a raw bar and a wine wall. A historic corner that housed a neighborhood restaurant is being built out as a destination speakeasy. None of the incoming operators are Laguna lifers. Two of the three are first expansions.
The Rest of the Address Sheet
The bookending is not accidental. Truly Pizza, which first opened in Dana Point in June 2023, will bookend the town this summer with two openings: Truly Pizza at 320 N Coast Highway in the former "3" restaurant, and Truly Bagels at 31727 Coast Highway in the long-shuttered Ti Amo space in South Laguna. The South Laguna location is designed as a counter-service, daytime-focused concept, which is the second daytime-forward bet on Coast Highway inside a six-month window.
The June wave added one more. El Matatan, the Latin-cuisine restaurant from Oscar Garcia in the City of Orange, opened for dinner soft service and moved to lunch on June 11, 2026. Its menu blends Cuban, Dominican, and authentic Mexico City fare, and Garcia brought Omar from Carmelita's over as the residing GM, which is the local-hire signal a lot of longtime residents were watching for.
The short version, by address:
- 400 S Coast Highway (Heisler Building): Noble Ace speakeasy, summer 2026
- 320 N Coast Highway (former "3"): Truly Pizza, 2026
- 858 S Coast Highway (former San Shi Go): Amorelia, now open
- 2794 S Coast Highway (former Dizz's As Is): Small's Smash Club, opened June 2026
- 31727 Coast Highway (former Ti Amo): Truly Bagels, summer 2026
The pattern that used to define Coast Highway, a mid-tier full-service dinner restaurant with a long tenure and a local family behind it, is not what came back. The two categories that did are counter-service daytime concepts and higher-end destination rooms. Very little in the middle.
The 60th-Anniversary Summer in the Canyon
The festivals are the other half of the story, and this year they are running heavier than usual on symbolism. The Sawdust Art Festival, June 26 to September 6, is celebrating its 60th anniversary in its eucalyptus-lined village at 935 Laguna Canyon Road, showcasing hand-crafted work exclusively from more than 180 local Laguna Beach artisans. Laguna Art-A-Fair, running the same June 26 to September 6 window at 777 Laguna Canyon Road, is also marking its 60th, and it remains the festival without residency restrictions, drawing an international cohort alongside domestic talent.
Two neighbors, both turning sixty, on the same summer, on opposite sides of the canyon road. That has not happened before.
Across the street, the Festival of Arts opens its open-air gallery July 7 through September 3 with fine art from more than 100 Orange County artists, and the Pageant of the Masters runs nightly July 9 through September 4 under this summer's theme, "The Greatest of All Time," using live models paired with orchestra and narration to recreate classical and contemporary works.
For someone who already lives here, the useful thing to know is that the Sawdust and Art-A-Fair anniversary marketing is going to draw more repeat visitors than a typical summer, and the two festivals sit less than a block apart on Laguna Canyon Road. Plan the canyon trips accordingly.
June 25 Was the Real Start of Summer
The trolley schedule change is the quiet detail that reorders how a resident actually moves through July and August. The city's non-summer trolley schedule ran September 2, 2025 through June 24, 2026, meaning the Coastal Route on Coast Highway between North Laguna, downtown, South Laguna, and the Ritz-Carlton in Dana Point kept limited early-close hours on weekdays through spring.
Starting June 25, the picture opened up. The Canyon Route restarts, running Laguna Canyon Road from the Act V peripheral parking lot at 1900 Laguna Canyon Road to the summer art festivals and downtown, 8:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m., seven days a week, every 30 minutes. The Coastal Route extends to 9 a.m. to 11:30 p.m., seven days a week. The Summer Breeze picks up from a free peripheral lot in Irvine on weekends.
Practically, that means the Act V lot at $5 for the summer weekends is again the answer to the festival parking problem, and the late-night Coastal Route is the answer to the dinner-plus-Pageant logistics problem. Neither was available for most of the past nine months.
What A Saturday Looks Like Now
The reason to string these three shifts together is that they compound. A resident heading downtown for dinner on a Saturday in mid-July has more options at more hours than at any point in recent memory: a mid-day counter-service smash burger at 2794 S PCH, a Mexico City tasting menu at 858, a canyon-side festival walk at Sawdust or Art-A-Fair, an 8:30 Pageant seat, and a trolley running back up Coast Highway past 11 p.m. without a car needed at any point in the sequence.
That specific chain was not available a year ago. Bodega had already closed, Dizz's was still operating a legacy menu, San Shi Go had gone dark, the trolley cut its evening service in September, and the Canyon Route was suspended. The town worked. It just worked differently.
What Hasn't Changed
Two things worth naming. The Sawdust ticket range remains modest: single-day admission is $5.50 to $12.50. And the Pageant is still the ticket to grab early, with seats starting as low as $42. Both prices have held roughly steady while the town's dining prices around them have climbed, which is one of the reasons long-time residents keep the festivals on the calendar even in years when the visitor crowd feels heavier.
The other unchanged thing is the identity of the address at 400 S Coast Highway. The Heisler Building is a designated historic structure, and whatever Noble Ace does behind the facade this summer, the corner itself is not going to look different. That continuity is part of why the incoming operators keep choosing Laguna in the first place, and it is worth mentioning to anyone who read the March headlines and assumed the town was becoming unrecognizable.
It is not. It is turning over faster than it did in the 2010s, on specific corners, in a specific direction. The rest of the map still reads the way it always has.
If you own on Coast Highway or in the canyon and want to talk through what this season's turnover means for your address specifically, Greenberg and Weinstock Team is available for a private consultation. Schedule a private consultation.
