Walk south from Heisler Park on a Tuesday evening in early August and count the storefronts that have new signage since March. Four, at least, before you hit Bluebird Canyon Road. The Village's dining spine has been rearranging itself all summer, quietly, one lease at a time, and it happens to coincide with the season the canyon fills with festival crowds. Most residents are still ordering from the places they knew in January.
The thesis of this post is simple. If you live in the Village, the smartest August plan is not to pick a restaurant or pick a festival night. It is to treat the block-by-block turnover on Coast Highway and the July-through-September festival calendar as one connected evening. The pieces are closer together than they look, and the changes are more substantial than a passing glance suggests.
What Actually Changed Between March and June
Two long-running institutions closed inside a hundred days of each other. 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. Both sat on Coast Highway. Both had regulars who had eaten in them for decades. Their replacements arrived on very different terms.
Here is the current map of what changed, from north to south:
| Address | Previous tenant | What is there now |
|---|---|---|
| 320 N. Coast Hwy | The "3" restaurant | Truly Pizza, North Laguna |
| 248 S. Coast Hwy | Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory | Nalu Poke, Tea & Boba |
| 400 S. Coast Hwy | Bodega, in the Heisler Building | Noble Ace |
| 858 S. Coast Hwy | San Shi Go, the stilt building | Amorelia |
| 2794 S. PCH | Dizz's As Is | Small's Smash Club |
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. The 2026 additions above extend that pattern, with one deliberate exception.
The Four Openings Worth Knowing By Name
Amorelia, at 858 S. Coast Highway, is the most ambitious of the group. A 185-seat Mexico City–focused restaurant from the Seretti family, whose Costa Mesa original has been serving for decades. The building is the one on stilts that used to house San Shi Go. The concept runs to raw bar, wagyu, uni and five seating areas that aren't just for sunset views. The entry-level floor has been outfitted with a showpiece bar and a significantly sizable wine structure, all of which carries handcrafted design details from Mexico throughout, including the few steps from the bar area up to the main dining room, the Raw Bar on the east side, and patio dining. Owner Gloria Seretti spent years finding the space.
Noble Ace is the deliberate exception to Laguna's daytime-and-counter drift. The historic Heisler Building will soon teem with new life, after Noble Ace announced its upcoming opening. The restaurant, which describes itself as a "Golden Age Hollywood-inspired speakeasy restaurant and bar," is the brainchild of Chef Magellan Moore of Mastro's Ocean Club and Elizabeth and Tom Schreiber. The restaurant will seat up to 150 guests. The bar will have a casual vibe, featuring a piano and live music, while the upstairs serves as the main dining area. An intimate den will cater to date nights, and wine lockers will be available for regular patrons. An 18-person private dining room will offer a more exclusive experience. This is a full-service dinner house designed to hold a table for a full evening, in a building that has been dark since early 2025.
Nalu Poke, Tea & Boba occupies the smallest and most historically significant footprint of the group. 248 S. Coast Highway, next to Better Buzz, in the space Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory occupied since 1984. That is a 41-year run ended, replaced by a counter-service concept aimed at the walk-by traffic between Main Beach and the boardwalk. If you have ever wondered what the daytime-focused shift looks like in one lease, this is it.
Small's Smash Club and El Matatan round out the list south of the Village. Small's Smash Club is opening its new location in Laguna Beach at 2794 S Pacific Coast Hwy. The company's second location will take over the former home of Dizz's As Is. Founded by professional snowboarder Jordan Small, Small's Smash Club began as a backyard operation during the COVID-19 pandemic before opening its first brick-and-mortar location in San Clemente in 2025. The team kept the ocean-view bar and liquor license from Dizz's. El Matatan, meanwhile, brings a specific Village connection that longtime residents will recognize immediately. The popular Latin cuisine-styled El Matatan has finally made its way from the City of Orange to Laguna Beach. Owner Oscar Garcia began dinner soft openings, and is now working his crew through the lunch ropes. Garcia's menu offers a blend of Cuban, Dominican and authentic Mexico City fare, with a raft of craft cocktails and shareable pitchers, wine and beer in play, too. And Oscar has snagged Omar from Carmelita's to be the residing GM.
That last detail matters. Omar is a Village fixture. Where he pours drinks is where a lot of the neighborhood follows.
The Pattern Underneath
Look at the five openings together and one thing is clear. Three of them are Latin-forward. Three of them favor short daytime service or single-item menus. Only Noble Ace is a classic Coast Highway dinner house. 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.
For someone who has lived in the Village for a decade, the practical translation is this. The old muscle memory of "let's grab dinner at the usual place at eight" now has fewer late-evening anchors than it did in 2019. It has more places to grab lunch, more counter concepts open at three in the afternoon, and, in Noble Ace, one large new bet that a well-run dinner room can still fill on a Wednesday.
Folding In The Festivals
Everyone in the Village knows the Pageant is happening. What is worth knowing this year is the specific frame the production team chose. The 2026 Pageant of the Masters theme is "The Greatest of All Time," a celebration of the artists, innovators, and masterpieces that have defined art history. This year's production will feature works by Michelangelo, Diego Velázquez, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, and Norman Rockwell. Shows run through Sept. 4. This year, the Pageant of the Masters has added a new element to the performance: audiences will also meet live-action portrayals of the artists.
Two other festivals share the canyon and the ticket economics. A short walk down the same canyon road, the Sawdust Art Festival celebrates its 60th anniversary in 2026. Set beneath eucalyptus trees on sawdust-covered paths, the festival is a handcrafted village of more than 180 artists, all of them Laguna Beach residents. Nothing here is mass-produced. Every piece is made and sold by the person who created it, which makes the Sawdust one of the few festivals of its kind in the country. Visitors can watch glassblowers, ceramicists, and jewelers work in real time, take a free hands-on class, and hear live music across three stages. The 60th is a milestone worth marking in person if you have not been in a few years.
For a Village resident who wants to visit all three without the à la carte pricing, the arithmetic is straightforward. For $29 you receive one-time entry to Laguna Art-A-Fair, Festival of Arts, and Sawdust Art Festival this summer, plus one-time free parking at Act V parking lot at 1900 Laguna Canyon Road, with free trolley services. Given single-day Sawdust tickets alone run to $12.50 and Festival of Arts admission tops out at $15, the passport is roughly break-even after two festivals and free on the third.
A Workable August Evening
If the point is to see what has changed and see the Pageant in the same trip, the sequence that actually works is this.
- Park at the Act V lot on Laguna Canyon Road in the late afternoon. Take the trolley into the Village.
- Walk Coast Highway from Heisler Park south. Stop at Nalu Poke for something cold. Look at the Heisler Building and see whether Noble Ace has the lights on yet.
- Turn around and walk north up the canyon on the trolley, or drive back to Act V.
- Get to the Festival of Arts grounds by seven. Wander the Sawdust across the road for the 60th anniversary layout.
- Settle into the Irvine Bowl by 8:20. Curtain at 8:30.
For a longer arc, add Amorelia on a separate night. It deserves its own evening, not a rushed pre-show table. Small's and El Matatan sit south of the Village core and read more naturally as a weekend lunch or a Sunday errand than a Pageant-night detour.
Why This Summer Reads Differently
Any summer in Laguna delivers a festival calendar and a restaurant scene. What makes 2026 unusual is the density of the turnover. A 40-year restaurant closed in March. A building that had been dark since 2025 has a signed tenant. A 41-year Rocky Mountain Chocolate lease ended, and a counter concept is in the space. The Pageant, at the top of the same road, decided this was the year to argue about which artists count as the greatest.
The reason to walk it now, before Labor Day, is that in six months the openings will be the new normal. The buildings will read as if they were always this way. The version of the Village that existed in February is already gone.
If you are thinking about how any of this shapes what your own block, condo, or oceanfront home is worth this fall, reach out to Team Laguna. We live here too, and we spend as much time walking Coast Highway as anyone.
