Sherman Gardens Gave Up Its Restaurant to Get Its Garden Back

Show up at 2647 East Coast Highway expecting a Wednesday lunch at the garden restaurant, and you will find a chain-link fence where the entrance used to be. The door has moved to the corner of Dahlia. There is no host stand, no menu board, no smell of biscuits coming off Chef Jessica Roy's line. For four years, that spot inside Sherman Library & Gardens was one of the quieter reasons Corona del Mar felt like Corona del Mar. It is gone, and the instinct is to read that as a loss.

It isn't. It's a trade, and the terms of the trade tell you more about how this neighborhood's oldest institution sees its own future than any press release does on its own.

What Actually Closed

The restaurant that closed last October was called 608 Dahlia, and its lineage inside the gardens goes back further than most locals realize. Chef Pascal Olhats ran the space as Café Jardin until he retired in 2021. Jessica Roy took it over, renamed it Cultivar, then renamed it again to 608 Dahlia, borrowing the street address most regulars used to find the entrance. She served her last lunch on October 26, 2025, closing out what she called four years of garden-to-table cooking built around whatever was blooming outside the window. She has since opened a new restaurant up the coast in Sunset Beach, a stand-alone space where she says she'll have more room to expand the same California, ingredient-driven style she built inside Sherman's walls.

So the restaurant is not gone from the world. It's gone from the garden. That distinction is the whole story.

Why the Garden Wanted Its Space Back

Four months after Chef Roy's last service, Sherman broke ground on the most significant construction project in its 60-year history: a $17 million capital campaign called Grow The Gardens, timed deliberately to coincide with the 60th anniversary of its 1966 founding. The core of the campus was built in 1966 and last substantially remodeled in 1970. Fifty-six years is a long time for aging infrastructure to carry a working kitchen, a dining room, and a botanical collection all on the same 2.2 acres.

"It was important for us to employ smart and sensitive design that honored the charm and character for the future of the Corona del Mar Village," said Tim Collins, chairman of the building committee, when the groundbreaking was announced.

The plan does something more specific than a facelift. The restaurant is not being rebuilt in place. It's being relocated entirely, out of the central garden and onto a rebuilt structure facing Pacific Coast Highway near a new Bell Tower entrance. According to Sherman's own announcement, that move frees the central garden to be used primarily for educational programming, which the organization describes as the backbone of its mission. In plain terms: for decades, a chunk of Sherman's most photographed real estate was doing double duty as a restaurant's back patio. Now it goes back to being garden.

The construction scope, as described by Sherman and reported by Newport Beach Indy, includes:

• A new Bell Tower entrance replacing the current Dahlia Avenue workaround
• A fully reconstructed two-story building on PCH to house the new restaurant, with an entrance directly off the highway
• A refurbished Tea Garden, revived from a feature that dates back to when the Junior League of Newport Beach served light lunches there decades ago
• Expanded classroom and lecture space inside the freed-up central garden footprint

Construction is expected to run about 18 months from the February 2026 groundbreaking, putting completion in late 2027.

What's Actually Open Right Now

None of that means the gardens are closed. They're not, and this season is arguably a better reason to visit than most.

Since May 16, Sherman has been hosting Dog Days of Sherman, an open-air art exhibit built around six large-scale mixed-media dog sculptures by Elizabeth Laul Healey, an artist who splits her roots between Laguna Beach and Corona del Mar and has made more than 250 of these pieces over her career. The exhibit runs through September 7 and is included with regular admission. One sculpture, a piece the gardens nicknamed Honey, said its goodbyes this week ahead of a trip to Nevada, selected for a spot at Burning Man, which opened August 30. If you wanted a photo with her at Sherman, that window just closed, but five of her siblings remain on view through September 7, along with the after-hours Yappy Hour events that let visitors bring leashed dogs in for an evening drink among the sculptures.

The garden's own read on this stretch of the calendar sits alongside a related theme worth knowing if art and ocean light are why you visit Corona del Mar in the first place, something we've written about before in where art meets ocean air.

The Preview Restaurant Before the Real One

The most interesting workaround Sherman has built during construction is a monthly event called Hazeltine's Afternoon Tea, and it's worth understanding because it's effectively a soft launch for the restaurant that won't fully open for another year plus.

The name comes from Moses Hazeltine Sherman, the gardens' namesake, and specifically from his daughter Hazeltine. The future restaurant will be run by Damian Orozco, owner of the Tea House on Los Rios in San Juan Capistrano, who was brought on for what Sherman's leadership described as his track record building community-rooted hospitality. Until the PCH building is finished, Orozco is running a once-a-month ticketed tea service inside the existing gardens, described by Sherman as a first taste of the hospitality the full restaurant will offer.

That $12 adult admission figure matters beyond the tea event. For years, Sherman charged a flat $5 to walk into the gardens. As of May 15, the organization shifted to seasonal admission pricing tied to its rotating exhibits, and $12 is what a non-member pays to get in the door during an exhibit season like this one. If you visit Sherman more than a couple of times a year, that's the kind of pricing shift worth knowing about before you show up expecting the old rate.

Planning an Actual Visit This Fall

The gardens are open daily from 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Regular on-site dining is not currently available, so this is not the season to plan a lunch around a Sherman visit the way regulars used to. What is available: the Dog Days sculptures through September 7, the fall harvest display that follows once the summer exhibit comes down, and the next round of Hazeltine's Afternoon Tea dates as they're announced on Sherman's site.

Members get in without paying the seasonal admission and get first access to tea reservations, which is worth factoring in if you're a frequent visitor rather than an occasional one. Sherman's own materials note that membership tends to pay for itself within about three visits at current pricing, which tracks given the jump from the old flat rate.

The Bigger Point for Corona del Mar

Sherman Library & Gardens has never been a static place, whatever the postcard version of it suggests. The same restaurant footprint has carried three different names in recent memory, Café Jardin under Chef Pascal Olhats, then Cultivar, then 608 Dahlia. Its Succulent Garden was once a Cactus Garden before a 2005 renovation. Now it sits mid-transformation on the largest capital project of its 60-year history. The current gap where a restaurant used to be isn't a sign the institution is faltering. It's what a nonprofit garden looks like when it decides the garden itself, not the dining room sitting on top of it, is the thing worth protecting for the next 60 years.

If you've lived near Corona del Mar long enough to remember Café Jardin, Cultivar, and 608 Dahlia as three different chapters of the same address, this one is worth watching closely. The Bell Tower entrance and the rebuilt PCH restaurant will change how the whole block reads from the street when they open. For now, the sculptures, the tea, and the quieter garden underneath the construction fencing are the version of Sherman that's actually here.

If you're thinking about what a neighborhood like this means for your own next move, whether that's staying rooted in Corona del Mar or exploring what else coastal Orange County has to offer, Vanessa Moore knows this stretch of coast block by block. Let's Connect.