New Restaurants in Laguna Beach for Fall 2026

"This is like if Hillstone and Mastro's had a baby." That is how co-owner Elizabeth Schreiber described the pricing at Noble Ace, the speakeasy-styled restaurant and bar that opened in June inside the historic Heisler Building. It is a useful line for more than one address. Walk Coast Highway this week, the same week Festival of Arts closes its 2026 run and the Pageant of the Masters takes its final bow, and you'll notice the town's four biggest restaurant reopenings of the year didn't all make the same bet. Some are betting on the room. Others are betting on the turn.

That distinction matters more than the simple fact that Laguna got new restaurants, because it tells you something the "new places to try" roundups don't: which of these spots were built to survive on festival season and resort traffic, and which were built to work as a Tuesday-night option regardless of what the calendar says. As the summer arts crowds file out this week, that difference is about to show up in wait times, reservation windows and which storefronts still feel busy in October.

The Room Bet vs. the Turn Bet

Look at how long each address sat dark before it reopened, and the pattern gets obvious.

The Heisler Building at 400 South Coast Highway, across from Main Beach, went vacant when Skyloft and its street-level sister restaurant Bodega shut down on January 4, 2025. Noble Ace didn't open until June 29, 2026, roughly a year and a half later. In that time, chef Magellan Moore (who spent years at Mastro's Ocean Club) and the Schreibers built a Golden Age Hollywood concept with design by Ralitsa Kombakis of Studio Rallou, brought on a general manager, Hillari Galindo, with two decades at Mastro's and Red O in Newport Beach, and set a split schedule built for lingering: 4:30 to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, 4:30 to 11 p.m. on weekends. That is a room designed to be a destination, and destinations take time to build.

Compare that to South Laguna. Dizz's As Is, the Pitz family's 40-plus-year-old continental restaurant, closed for good on March 13, 2026. Small's Smash Club, founded by professional snowboarder Jordan Small, opened in the same 1920s building on June 6, less than three months later. The new owners kept the existing bar and liquor license, kept the ocean view, kept the enclosed garden patio, and swapped the menu for smash burgers, tallow fries and onion rings. Opening night drew a line that stretched through the entire weekend. That is not a room built for a two-hour dinner reservation. It's a room built to turn tables fast and often.

Amorelia Cocina Artesanal, the 185-seat Mexico City-focused restaurant that took over the "stilt" space at 858 South Coast Highway, sits closer to the Noble Ace end of that spectrum. The opening was originally targeted for the summer before, but an unexpected departure by the lead chef pushed the debut back nearly two years. When it finally opened, it opened big: a raw bar, wagyu, uni, five separate seating areas and a patio, the kind of buildout that explains why it took so long to get open and why owner Gloria Seretti and her son Daniel Paniagua built it to hold a crowd rather than turn a counter.

Then there's Truly Pizza, which opened in May at 320 North Coast Highway, next to Urth Caffé and directly across from the Laguna Art Museum. It's roughly 100 seats, open 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily except Tuesdays, and it already ranked No. 4 on the 2026 edition of 50 Top Pizza USA, with its Umami Mushroom pizza named the organization's 2026 Pizza of the Year. That national recognition is real, but the format underneath it is still a fast-casual pizza counter built to serve lunch and dinner crowds on a normal turn, not a reservations-only dining room.

Where Each Bet Landed on the Map

The two strategies aren't scattered randomly across town. They cluster.

North Laguna got the counter-service national pizza story. South Laguna got the burger flip. The stretch of Coast Highway and inland streets around Main Beach and the museum, the middle of town, got the two slow-build destination rooms plus a third on the way. That's not an accident of timing. It's a read on foot traffic: the town center can support a room that asks people to wait for a table, while the outer stretches of Coast Highway do better with something a local can walk into on a Tuesday without planning ahead.

K'ya Laguna splits the difference. It reopened in February inside La Casa del Camino under chef Ceferino Hernandez, who worked the hotel during the original K'ya era and rebuilt dishes like Korean short ribs and lobster mac and cheese from memory. At 58 seats with a bar and live music, it's smaller than either Noble Ace or Amorelia, but it's tied to the hotel's built-in resort traffic rather than depending purely on walk-up demand, which is its own version of a room bet.

The One Opening Timed for This Exact Week

Here's where the pattern gets interesting. Bar ízi, the small-plates concept taking over the former Evan's Gourmet space at Glenneyre and Thalia, has been targeting an end-of-August or early-September debut. Owner Sam Rabon spent months on the buildout, a natural-wine program and a locally sourced, highly seasonal menu in an intentionally small room.

That timing is not incidental. Evan's Gourmet closed in August 2025 after chef Evan Lewis struggled to bring evening diners into that address even though her daytime catering operation at the Sawdust Festival was thriving. A full year of renovation later, Bar ízi is aiming to open into the exact week the town's tourist calendar clears out, not before it. Festival of Arts wraps its 2026 run on September 3. The Pageant of the Masters closes September 4. Sawdust Art Festival and Art-A-Fair run through September 6. For most of the summer, Laguna Canyon Road and the downtown grid have been absorbing festival crowds on top of normal beach traffic. Opening a small, reservation-driven room into that exact week, rather than into the noise of July, reads like a deliberate bet on being a locals' restaurant from day one rather than a festival-season restaurant that has to retrain its audience once August ends.

What This Actually Changes for the Next Few Weeks

If you've been putting off trying any of these places because the town felt too crowded to bother, the math changes this week. The fast-turn spots, Truly Pizza and Small's Smash Club, were already built to handle a normal week, so nothing changes there beyond slightly shorter lines. The destination rooms are a different story. Noble Ace and Amorelia spent their opening months competing for tables against festival visitors filling up the Montage and the rest of the town's hotel rooms. Once that overlay lifts after Labor Day weekend, a Thursday reservation at either room should be a meaningfully different experience than the one you'd have gotten in July.

Bar ízi is the one to watch first. If it opens on schedule this week or next, it's stepping into a town with noticeably less competition for evening tables than it would have faced in any month since June. Whether the natural-wine program and locally sourced menu match the ambition of the buildout is something only a visit will tell you, but the timing itself is a signal that Rabon is playing the long game rather than chasing a festival crowd that was never going to be his regulars.

That's the actual story here. Four addresses reopened this year. Two are betting the room is worth the wait. Two are betting the wait is the problem. And the fifth is betting that the best week to open a small, ambitious dining room in Laguna Beach is the one where the tourists just left and the town gets its tables back.

If you're a Laguna Beach homeowner and you're curious how a shifting local business mix and this year's steady stream of visitor traffic show up in what your property is worth, Team Mike & Tasha tracks these neighborhood-level shifts as closely as the restaurant reshuffle. Get your free home valuation whenever you're ready to see where things stand.