Coast Highway Just Split Into Two Different Dining Scenes

Where did Dizz's go? It's the kind of question that circulates at the dog park and in line at the post office this time of year, because for over four decades the answer to "where should we eat tonight" in South Laguna was simple: Dizz's As Is, rack of lamb, raspberry duck, the same eclectic dining room the Pitz family had run since Marcel Pitz opened it in 1977. That answer stopped working on March 13, 2026, when the restaurant closed for good.

It wasn't the only storefront to go dark. By early this year, four addresses along Coast Highway sat empty at once: the historic Heisler Building across from Main Beach, the raised "stilt" building at 858 South Coast that longtime locals still call by its old tenant's name, the long-shuttered Ti Amo space in South Laguna, and Dizz's. Between March and July, every one of them turned back on, plus a fifth. If you've driven the highway from Heisler Park to Aliso Beach this summer, you've probably noticed the difference without being able to name it. Here's the name: the town's dining scene didn't just refill four empty rooms. It sorted itself into two distinct economies, and which one landed on your stretch of highway says something real about how Laguna eats now.

The Room That Bet Big, and the One That Bet Fast

Start downtown, because that's where the biggest swing landed. The Heisler Building at 400 South Coast Highway had been dark since Bodega and Skyloft closed in early 2025. This summer it reopened as Noble Ace, a Golden Age Hollywood-inspired supper club from chef Magellan Moore, formerly of Mastro's Ocean Club, and owners Tom and Elizabeth Schreiber. The team is deeper than most single-location openings manage. Hillari Galindo, who spent two decades between Mastro's Ocean Club and Red O in Newport Beach, runs the floor as general manager, and Danny Reyes, who started his Laguna career at Odessa, returned as assistant GM.

Elizabeth Schreiber told the Orange County Register that she and Moore go back well before the ground floor of the Heisler Building was theirs to design. "Magellan and I met 12 years ago when we worked together at Mastro's while getting my degree from USC," she said. She described the pricing spread to What Now Orange County a different way:

"This is like if Hillstone and Mastro's had a baby."

That's a downtown bet: reservation-required, chef-driven, built for a Friday night that starts at 4:30 and can run past 10.

A mile and a half south, the same season produced the opposite bet. Small's Smash Club, founded by professional snowboarder Jordan Small and already running a first location in San Clemente, took over the old Dizz's space in June, keeping the existing bar, the liquor license, and the ocean view, and swapping the continental menu for smash burgers, tallow fries, and onion rings. The opening drew a line that stretched through the entire weekend. No reservations, no rack of lamb, just a faster turn on the same view.

Downtown Reserves, the Edges Turn Tables

Read the full list of what opened this summer and the pattern holds up block by block.

The two full-service, reservation-required rooms, Noble Ace and Amorelia, sit within a few blocks of Main Beach, aimed at the same evening crowd willing to book ahead and pay Montage-adjacent numbers for the experience. Everything else, the burgers, the bagels, the poke, the pizza expansion, landed on the northern or southern approach into town, built around counter service and a faster table turn rather than a long dinner shift.

That's not a coincidence of available leases. A local restaurant tracker who has covered the dining beat for eighteen years documented 15 new food and beverage openings against seven closures across all of 2025, and the newer concepts have consistently skewed toward shorter daytime service rather than the long full-service dinner shifts that defined the last generation of Coast Highway restaurants. This summer's turnover is that same trend showing up all at once, in real addresses you can drive past.

Amorelia is its own story inside that story. The 185-seat restaurant, from owner Gloria Seretti and her son Daniel Paniagua, is the first expansion for a family that has run a Mexican restaurant in Costa Mesa for decades. Seretti had been looking for a Laguna location for years before the old San Shi Go stilt building came open, and she brought the full build: a showpiece bar, a wine structure, a raw bar on the east side, and patio dining, all with design details carried through from Mexico.

The One Restaurant That Doesn't Fit Either Bucket

Not everything sorts neatly. South Laguna also picked up an Empire Oyster Raw Bar, an intimate omakase-style seafood counter with only 10 to 12 seats, tucked into the former Thai by the Sea space at 31715 Coast Highway, half a block from AHBA. It's on the edge of town geographically, but it's not a quick-turn concept. There's no counter-service line here, no walk-in burger crowd. It's a small, high-end room built around a prix-fixe seafood experience, the kind of concept you'd expect downtown, not on the southern approach into the highway. If the rest of this summer's openings prove a rule about downtown reservations and edge-town speed, the raw bar is the exception that keeps the rule honest. Not every new address fits the pattern. It just means the pattern is worth watching rather than assuming.

Using the Turnover While the Festival Season Is Still Running

All of this happened to land in the same summer as Laguna's three overlapping arts festivals, and if you live here, the timing is worth using rather than just noticing. Pageant of the Masters runs nightly through September 4, 2026, its 93rd consecutive year, with this season's production titled "The Greatest of All Time." The Festival of Arts runs its open-air fine art show through September 3, and the Sawdust Art Festival, the bohemian counterpart that has run in Laguna Canyon since the 1960s, is open through late August, a short walk down Laguna Canyon Road from the Festival grounds.

If you're pairing a festival night with dinner at one of the new downtown rooms, plan around the crowd the way you would for any Friday in peak season. The free trolley runs the length of Coast Highway from North Laguna and Heisler Park through downtown to South Laguna and Mission Hospital, with service roughly every 20 to 30 minutes and extended weekend hours through the summer. Parking downtown gets tight fast once the Pageant crowd arrives, so if your plans take you south toward Small's or Truly Bagels, the trolley or a short walk from one of the South Laguna lots is a better bet than circling Coast Highway looking for a meter.

What the Turnover Actually Tells You

None of this is really about which burger is better than which raw bar. It's about what kind of bet operators are willing to make on different stretches of the same street. Downtown gets the reservation, the chef pedigree, and the four-hour dinner shift. The edges get the counter, the daytime hours, and the faster table turn. That split didn't exist in quite this form a year ago, when four of these addresses were still dark. It exists now because enough operators looked at the same half mile of highway and reached different conclusions about where the money is.

If you've lived here long enough to remember what used to occupy any of these five addresses, you already know how fast a stretch of Coast Highway can change character. Keep an eye on which of this summer's bets is still drawing a line by next Labor Day. That's usually the more honest answer than anything a grand opening announcement can tell you.

For more on what makes different pockets of Laguna Beach worth knowing, from the Village to the hillside canyons, Vanessa Moore Homes keeps a running local read on the neighborhood. Let's Connect if you want the version of this story tied to a specific street.