For most of 2025, if you lived in Crown Point and wanted a proper dinner without getting in the car, you drove south. The stretch of North Coast Highway between Crescent Bay and downtown had gone quiet, and the closest full kitchen worth walking to was a Main Beach crowd you'd fight for parking to reach. That changed this spring, and it changed in a way that tells you something about how this end of town actually works, not just what opened.
On May 7, Truly Pizza took over 320 North Coast Highway, the address that had sat as the shuttered restaurant "3" for a stretch of time locals stopped tracking. The space sits right next to Urth Caffe, a few blocks up from downtown and well within an easy walk or bike ride if you're coming from Crown Point or the Tree Streets. A ribbon cutting followed on June 11, and by then the pizzeria had already picked up a national credential: Truly Pizza landed at No. 4 on the 2026 edition of 50 Top Pizza USA, with its Umami Mushroom Pizza, a white pie built on roasted mushrooms, toasted sesame oil, a seed crust, and bonito flakes, named Pizza of the Year.
This is the third year running that Truly Pizza has taken that Pizza of the Year honor, and it's the same team that opened the Dana Point flagship in 2023. Co-founder Donna Baldwin, talking to the Laguna Beach Independent about why the brand keeps choosing beach towns over inland growth, put it simply. Beach communities have an energy you just can't replicate, she said, and that's the operating logic behind the Laguna location and the Venice Beach unit still on the way for late 2026.
The Address a Few Blocks South Tells a Different Story
Down toward Main Beach, the same season produced an almost opposite kind of opening. The Heisler Building at 400 South Coast Highway, on the corner across from Main Beach, had sat dark since Bodega and its upstairs sibling Skyloft both closed in January 2025. The building's owner, L.A.-based Pegasus Investments, bought the property in 2023 for $16.5 million from longtime Laguna resident Sam Goldstein. On June 29, the ground floor reopened as Noble Ace, a Golden Age Hollywood-inspired supper club from Chef Magellan Moore, who spent twelve years as head chef at Mastro's Ocean Club in Newport Beach, and co-founder Elizabeth Schreiber.
Noble Ace is not a quick-stop kind of place. It seats up to 150 across a bar with a baby grand piano, a main dining room, and an 18-person private room, with hours running 4:30 to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and until 11 on weekends. Schreiber described the design as brass, dark green, tangerine, and velvet accents with a coastal edge, and the general manager, Hillari Galindo, spent two decades between Mastro's Ocean Club and Red O in Newport before taking the job.
Put the two openings side by side and a pattern shows up that's easy to miss if you only hear about one of them. A few blocks farther south, Nalu Poke, Tea & Boba is moving into 248 South Coast Highway, taking space that Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory had occupied since 1984. And south of downtown, Small's Smash Club, a burger concept founded by professional snowboarder Jordan Small, opened in June inside the old Dizz's As Is space, a restaurant the Pitz family had run for more than 40 years before closing it on March 13, 2026. Small's kept the existing bar and liquor license and the ocean view that came with it.
Read that list in order and the split is obvious. The reservation-required, full-service bets, Noble Ace, are clustered right around Main Beach. The counter-service, walk-up concepts, pizza, poke, burgers, a bagel shop planned for the old Ti Amo space in South Laguna, are landing on the edges of Coast Highway. That's not a coincidence of which leases happened to be available. It's what the rents and the customer base on each end of town can actually support.
What That Split Means If You Live on This End
If you're in Crown Point, this matters for a practical reason. Your new neighborhood spot isn't trying to be a reservation night. It's built to be the place you duck into on a Tuesday without planning ahead, and that's exactly the gap that had been sitting empty on this stretch of highway for a while. A full-service dinner house needs the hotel guest and special-occasion traffic that clusters downtown. A pizza counter needs consistent weekday volume from people who already live nearby and will come back on a random Wednesday, which is a different bet entirely, and one that fits North Laguna's daily rhythm better than a white-tablecloth room would.
Here's a fair way to plan a visit if you haven't been down yet:
- Truly Pizza, 320 N. Coast Hwy: no reservation needed, walk-in counter service, next to Urth Caffe
- Noble Ace, 400 S. Coast Hwy: reservation recommended, especially Friday and Saturday, in the historic Heisler Building across from Main Beach
- Nalu Poke, Tea & Boba, 248 S. Coast Hwy: counter service, next to Better Buzz Coffee
The Clock on the Rest of Summer
There's a reason to make this trip sooner rather than later. The Festival of Arts fine art show runs through September 3 this year, and the Pageant of the Masters performs nightly through September 4, with this year's production, The Greatest of All Time, built around forty works spanning Michelangelo to Frida Kahlo. The Sawdust Art Festival, marking its 60th season, runs through September 6. All three sit within walking distance of each other off Laguna Canyon Road, and Laguna Beach locals get free Sawdust admission every Monday and Thursday after 3 p.m. with valid ID, a detail a lot of longtime residents forget to use until the season is almost over.
None of this requires a special trip if you already live here. It's the kind of evening that works because the pieces are close together: park once, grab a slice at Truly Pizza on the way down, use the Monday or Thursday locals' window at Sawdust, and decide later in the summer whether the Heisler Building's new supper club is worth the reservation. The interesting part isn't that Laguna added a few restaurants this year. It's that the town sorted itself into two different economies on the same road, and for the first time in a while, the one that landed on the north end is built for exactly the kind of weeknight you're actually having.
I've watched storefronts on this stretch of highway sit dark and come back to life more than once over the years, and this particular round feels different because it matches what the neighborhood actually needed rather than what looked good on a press release. If you've got questions about how North Laguna's day-to-day keeps evolving, or you're simply curious what else is changing block by block, I'm always glad to talk through it.
Daniel Haney has spent decades as a North Laguna resident and specializes in Emerald Bay, Crown Point, the Tree Streets, and Cliff Drive. Let's Connect.
