If you drove past the old Taco Loco storefront on Pacific Coast Highway this year and assumed it had joined the long list of Laguna restaurants that quietly went dark, you weren't wrong about the building. You were wrong about the taco stand. Chef Gonzalo Rebollar's crew didn't retire the recipes. They moved them a quarter mile up the canyon, behind the sawdust-covered paths of the Sawdust Art Festival, where they're serving through September 6.
That single relocation is a decent stand-in for what's actually happened to Laguna Beach this summer. While most of the town's attention was on the eucalyptus groves and the easel rows, the storefronts along Coast Highway were doing their own quiet reshuffling, and the two stories turn out to be more connected than they look from a distance. Here's what changed, what's still free if you already live here, and how little time is left to catch any of it in its current form.
The Festival Grounds Absorbed Part of the Restaurant Scene
Sawdust's food lineup this year isn't just returning vendors reheating last summer's menu. The Cove by Starfish debuted a churro bao bun that's become the thing people talk about before they talk about the art. AhbA is making its first appearance at the festival with a burger-forward menu. And Taco Loco, described on the festival's own ticket page as "a former PCH staple," is the clearest sign that closing a storefront in Laguna doesn't always mean closing the kitchen. It can mean trading rent on Coast Highway for a nine-week run inside a gated village that pulls in more than 200,000 visitors a summer.
That's worth sitting with if you live here and you've been keeping a mental list of what's closed this year. Some of it closed. Some of it just went seasonal and moved somewhere you weren't looking.
Two 60th Anniversaries, Closing Within Three Days of Each Other
Here's the part that hasn't gotten much attention: Sawdust and Laguna Art-A-Fair are both marking their 60th anniversary this year, and neither coordinated the timing with the other. Both close on September 6. A few blocks away, the Festival of Arts, which opened its own open-air gallery on July 7 with more than 100 juried artists, isn't part of that anniversary but happens to close just three days earlier, on September 3.
As of today, that leaves thirteen days before Sawdust and Art-A-Fair go dark for the season, and ten before the Festival of Arts does. Two nonprofits hitting the same landmark year, plus a third running its own separate calendar, all winding down within days of each other this fall. If you've been telling yourself you'll get to the canyon "later this summer," later is now down to two more weekends.
A few things worth knowing before those gates close:
- Sawdust locals night: Laguna Beach residents get free entry every Thursday with valid ID, and one official listing includes Monday as a second free day. Cutoff times vary by source too, some say 3 p.m., others say 4 p.m., so it's worth confirming at the gate rather than timing it to the minute.
- Passport to the Arts: A $29 pass gets you one-time entry to all three festivals, plus a one-time free parking pass at the Act V lot.
- Single-day pricing at Sawdust: $12.50 for adults, $10.50 for seniors 65 and up, $5.50 for youth 6 to 12, free under 5. Veterans get in free any day with military ID.
- Hours: Sunday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.
None of this requires advance planning beyond showing up with the right ID. It does require showing up before September 6.
Coast Highway Didn't Sit Still Either
While the festival calendar was building toward its anniversary close, four of the most-watched vacant storefronts in town turned back on between March and July, and a fifth joined them not long after. None of it happened randomly. Read the addresses together and the town is sorting itself into two different dining economies, one downtown and one at the bookends of Coast Highway, each running by different rules.
| Address | What was there | What's there now |
|---|---|---|
| 400 S. Coast Highway (the Heisler Building) | Bodega and Skyloft, dark since January 2025 | Noble Ace, opened June 29, 2026 |
| 2794 S. Pacific Coast Highway | Dizz's As Is, closed March 13, 2026, after more than 40 years under the Pitz family | Small's Smash Club, a second location from the San Clemente original |
| 320 N. Coast Highway | The former "3" restaurant | Truly Pizza's second location |
| 31727 Coast Highway (South Laguna) | Ti Amo | Truly Bagels, a daytime counter concept |
| Glenneyre and Thalia (formerly Evan's Gourmet, before that Cafe Zoolu) | Evan's Gourmet, closed August 2025 | Bar ízi, targeting a late-August or early-September debut |
The most-watched of these was the Heisler Building, which sat empty for a year and a half after Bodega and Skyloft shut down. What moved in is a "Golden Age Hollywood-inspired" supper club from Chef Magellan Moore, a Mastro's Ocean Club alum, alongside owners Elizabeth and Tom Schreiber. Elizabeth described the pitch this way:
"This is like if Hillstone and Mastro's had a baby."
That framing tells you where the room is aimed: a walk-in bar with a piano for a casual evening, and a reservation-only chef's table upstairs for something more considered. Two blocks south, the calculus was the opposite. When Dizz's As Is closed after four decades of rack of lamb and raspberry duck, what replaced it wasn't another continental menu. Small's Smash Club, founded by professional snowboarder Jordan Small, kept the existing bar and the ocean view and put smash burgers and tallow fries in its place. It opened on a Friday in June to a line that ran through the weekend, which tells you plenty about how a casual concept performs in a room with that view.
Meanwhile Truly Pizza, which started in Dana Point in 2023, is doing something no other operator in town has tried: opening two different concepts at once, one at each end of Coast Highway. Full-service pizza goes north into the old "3" space. A daytime bagel counter goes south into the long-shuttered Ti Amo building. If you live between Aliso and Three Arch, that second one means a walkable bagel option that hasn't existed in years.
What This Means If You Live Here
None of this requires you to do anything differently than you already do most Augusts. But two windows are closing at once, and they happen to be adjacent. Sawdust and Art-A-Fair wrap their 60th season over the next two weekends, the Festival of Arts closes a few days earlier, and the restaurant map that grew up around all three this year, including the taco stand that didn't actually close, looks different than it did back in June.
If there's a version of this summer you want to catch before it resets, the next thirteen days are it. Grab a Thursday locals-night entry to Sawdust while Taco Loco is still serving inside the gate. Walk a few blocks over afterward and see what a year of Coast Highway turnover actually looks like in person, whether that's the piano bar at Noble Ace or the burger line at Small's. By the time the Festival of Arts closes its gallery on September 3, most of these changes will have settled into the version of Laguna that sticks around through winter.
That's the thing about a town that reinvents pieces of itself every summer. The people who live here are usually the last to notice how much moved, because they were too busy walking past it on the way to something else.
If you're weighing a move to Laguna Beach, or just curious what a summer like this one does to property values along the canyon corridor, Shannon Parks has spent her career watching South Orange County change one storefront and one season at a time. Let's Connect.
