Dizz's As Is served rack of lamb, surf and turf, and raspberry duck out of the same Coast Highway building for more than 40 years before the Pitz family closed it for good on March 13, 2026. Marcel Pitz opened the place in 1977. Within weeks, a burger counter had the lease.
That single swap tells you less than the pattern around it. Coast Highway has turned over more restaurant space this year than most residents can remember happening in one stretch, and the character of what's moving in looks almost nothing like what it replaced. If you've noticed the construction paper in more storefront windows than usual, there's a reason, and it's not random.
A 40-Year Dinner House Becomes a Smash Burger Counter
Small's Smash Club is taking over the old Dizz's As Is building at 2794 S. Coast Highway, keeping the existing bar, the liquor license, and the ocean view that made the space a fixture in the first place, according to Patch. The company was started by pro snowboarder Jordan Small as a backyard operation during the pandemic before it opened its first location in San Clemente in 2025. This is the second.
It's a clean trade in square footage and a complete reversal in format. Dizz's ran a full continental menu with tableside service for four decades. What's replacing it is smash burgers, tallow fries, and onion rings, ordered at a counter.
A few blocks south, the same story played out at a slower pace but with the same shape. The historic Heisler Building at 400 S. Coast Highway sat vacant for more than a year after Bodega closed in early 2025, until Noble Ace announced it would take the space. More on that in a minute, because Noble Ace is the exception that makes the rest of this pattern worth naming.
Three New Restaurants, and Almost None of Them Are a Full Sit-Down Dinner
Look at what actually opened on Coast Highway this year and a shape emerges. Most of it is built for faster turns, not long tableside dinners:
- Truly Pizza, at 320 N. Coast Highway in the former "3" space, is the Dana Point original's first expansion since it opened there in June 2023.
- Truly Bagels, a daytime counter concept from the same team, took over the long-shuttered Ti Amo space in South Laguna at 31727 Coast Highway.
- El Matatan, serving Cuban, Dominican, and Mexico City cooking from owner Oscar Garcia, opened for lunch in June 2026 after expanding down from the City of Orange. Omar, previously of Carmelita's, is running the floor as GM.
- Amorelia, at 858 S. Coast Highway in the old San Shi Go stilt building, is the one full dinner-service play in this group. It's a 185-seat, Mexico City-focused restaurant from the Seretti family, whose original location has run in Costa Mesa for decades. Owner Gloria Seretti and her son Daniel Paniagua spent nearly two years getting it open.
Three of these four lean toward quick counter service or daytime hours. Only Amorelia commits to the long dinner-house format, and even that one took two years and a near-collapse two weeks before its original opening date to get across the finish line. Full-service restaurants are getting harder to open on this stretch of highway, not easier, and the businesses filling the gaps are mostly built around speed.
The One Restaurant Betting the Other Way
Noble Ace is the outlier, and it's worth understanding why. The concept is a Golden Age Hollywood-inspired speakeasy from Chef Magellan Moore, who came up through Mastro's Ocean Club, and co-owners Elizabeth and Tom Schreiber. Schreiber grew up in Orange County and finished her USC degree while working alongside Moore at Mastro's more than a decade ago, according to WhatNow Orange County. She spent the years since raising a family and working in real estate before finally convincing Moore to open a restaurant with her.
What they're building is the opposite bet from everything else on this list. Noble Ace will seat up to 150 guests across multiple distinct rooms: a bar with a piano and live music, an upstairs main dining room, an intimate den for date nights, wine lockers for regulars, and an 18-person private dining room. The plan includes a five-course seated brunch once the restaurant is fully open. That's a lot of square footage and a lot of staffing for a summer when most of the new competition is built around a single menu item and a walk-up window.
Noble Ace is filling the one vacancy on Coast Highway that sat empty the longest. A speakeasy needs more construction, more permitting, and more capital than a bagel counter, which may be exactly why it took over a year for anyone to commit to that building after Bodega closed.
The Pageant Is Asking the Same Question the Highway Is Answering
This year's Festival of Arts season, running now through Labor Day, built its Pageant of the Masters production around the theme "The Greatest of All Time", staging roughly forty re-created artworks that each make their own case for the title. It's a fitting backdrop for a summer when Coast Highway is quietly running its own version of that argument. A 40-year dinner house just lost to a burger counter. A vacant speakeasy building is betting that long-format hospitality still has a future here. Nobody on the highway has settled the question either.
If you're heading to the Festival of Arts grounds or the Pageant this month, the free trolley system makes the trip easier than parking ever will. The Canyon Route runs from the Act V park-and-ride lot at 1900 Laguna Canyon Road straight to the festival grounds and downtown, with buses arriving roughly every 30 minutes through the evening according to the City of Laguna Beach. The year-round Coastal Route still covers the length of Coast Highway from Heisler Park down through South Laguna to the Ritz-Carlton at the Dana Point line, per Visit Laguna Beach, which means you can ride the same trolley from a Pageant seat to a table at Amorelia without moving your car once.
Sunday Nights Still Belong to Bluebird Park
Away from the highway, the town's other August ritual is running on schedule. Music in the Park, the free Sunday evening concert series at Bluebird Park, has Missus Jones performing an Amy Winehouse tribute on August 9 and Rose's Pawn Shop playing American roots music on August 16, with sets starting at 5 p.m., according to the City of Laguna Beach. Bring a low beach chair, skip the drone, and if you're bringing a bottle of wine, plan to eat something with it. The city enforces both rules.
What This Adds Up To
None of these changes are dramatic on their own. A burger counter replacing a steakhouse is one storefront. A speakeasy taking over a year-vacant building is another. But look at the whole stretch of highway at once and the direction is clear: the restaurants that used to anchor a night out here, the ones built for a three-hour dinner and a bottle of wine, are getting replaced mostly by places designed for fifteen minutes at a counter. Amorelia and Noble Ace are the two bets against that current, and both of them took far longer and cost far more to open than anything else on this list.
That's worth knowing if you've lived here long enough to remember what used to be in these buildings, and it's worth watching if you care whether Coast Highway still has room for a long dinner five years from now.
If you're tracking how Laguna Beach changes, block by block, Brian Liberto has been paying attention to this town for over two decades, on the highway and off it. Let's Connect.
