"It's really about creating the sense of community. Everybody that walks through the door, we want to feel like they're walking into our house."
That's Gus Floris, co-owner of Brooklyn City Pizzeria & Market on Crown Valley Parkway, talking to ABC7's Community Eats team this spring about the slice shop he and his wife Margie built out of a pandemic-era home pizza business. Four years later, the New York transplants have a brick-and-mortar spot with four tables, a cult following for the Manzo pie, and enough regulars that DoorDash orders reportedly get cut off early some nights because the kitchen sells out.
It's a good story on its own. It becomes a more interesting one when you set it next to what's happening a mile and a half away at Ocean Ranch Village, where the shopping center's longtime sit-down anchor has gone dark and its replacement isn't opening this year, or even next spring. Two restaurants, two very different fall seasons. Together they say something about how this neighborhood is actually eating right now, and it isn't the story a five-year-old "best restaurants" list would tell you.
The Corner That Used to Be Hendrix
For most of the last decade, if you wanted a sit-down dinner at Ocean Ranch Village, the answer was Hendrix Restaurant & Bar, the New American spot at 32431 Golden Lantern from the team behind Driftwood Kitchen and The Deck on Laguna Beach. It had a rotisserie up front, a wine shop built into the dining room, and a chef who lived close enough to text regulars about reservations himself.
That restaurant is gone. According to a July 10, 2026 report from Patch, a new concept called Good Boy, developed by Specialty Restaurant Corporation, will take over the former Hendrix space at Ocean Ranch Village, described by the company as a steak-forward, "no veto" menu built for everything from a weeknight drink to a late celebration. The opening date given in that reporting is early 2027.
That's not a small gap. Ocean Ranch Village is anchored by Trader Joe's and a Cinépolis multiplex, which means the center still draws steady daytime and evening foot traffic. What it doesn't have, for at least the next several months, is the one restaurant built to hold that traffic after the movie lets out. A shopping center built around a full-service dinner anchor is currently running without one, and the neighborhood has had to figure out where that appetite goes in the meantime.
Where Dinner Actually Goes This Fall
The answer isn't another big sit-down restaurant stepping into the gap. It's smaller, independently scaled spots absorbing the traffic in pieces.
Sweetgreen operates a location in the Plaza de la Paz center at 27221 La Paz Road, seating 43 diners indoors and another 42 on the patio, open daily from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. It's a fast-casual format built for a quick weeknight bowl, not a reservation-list dinner, but it's the kind of spot that picks up the traffic a closed sit-down restaurant used to hold on to.
Then there's Brooklyn City Pizzeria & Market, which is doing the opposite of scaling up. It's a four-table takeout-and-delivery operation at 30012 Crown Valley Parkway that has built enough of a following in four years to land a citywide TV feature, and it's still closed on Mondays. That's not a business chasing Ocean Ranch Village's old dinner-destination model. It's a neighborhood order-ahead spot that happens to be thriving at exactly the moment the center a mile away is missing its main course.
Put those two next to each other and the pattern is clear. Laguna Niguel's dinner options this fall aren't consolidating around one big anchor the way they did when Hendrix was open. They're splitting across smaller, single-location spots that don't need a 180-seat dining room to make the trip worth it. Good Boy may well restore that anchor role when it opens in 2027. Until then, the neighborhood's actual weeknight dinner map looks smaller and more scattered than it did two years ago, and that's worth knowing before you drive to Ocean Ranch Village expecting the restaurant that used to be there.
The City Calendar Picks Up the Slack
With the shopping center's anchor dark, a fair amount of the neighborhood's evening plans this month are coming from somewhere other than a restaurant reservation. The city's own recreation calendar for September is doing real work, and it's more specific than a generic "things to do" list would suggest.
| Date | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Sept. 5 | Jazz with Janet and the Akusta Kats | Jack's Woodside Grille |
| Sept. 13 | Mindful Melodies | Crown Valley Community Center |
| Sept. 18 | Sea Country Cinema: Jerry and Marge Go Large | Sea Country Senior & Community Center |
| Sept. 19 | Halfway to St. Patrick's Day Party | The Original Patsy's Irish Pub |
| Sept. 24 | "What's in Your Pack?" trail talk | Niguel Trail |
| Sept. 25 | Hoedown | Sea Country Senior & Community Center |
| Sept. 25 | Fall Flicks: Toy Story 3 | Crown Valley Park |
None of these are the kind of programming built to compete with a restaurant. A senior center movie screening and a trail talk about pack gear aren't dinner plans. But they fill exactly the kind of casual weeknight and weekend slot that a full sit-down anchor at Ocean Ranch Village used to absorb, and they're happening on a schedule specific enough that you can actually plan around it instead of guessing.
The Friday night live music series at 27891 La Paz Road, running all four Fridays in September, works the same way. It's not replacing Hendrix. It's evidence that the neighborhood's evening activity has diversified into smaller, more frequent, lower-stakes options while its one big dinner destination waits on a 2027 reopening.
What This Means If You're Trying to Plan a Week Here
None of this is bad news. A center of gravity that splits across a fast-casual spot, a four-table pizzeria, a brewery night out, and a packed city calendar is arguably more resilient than one that depended on a single restaurant staying open forever. But it does mean the old assumption, that Ocean Ranch Village is where you go for a proper sit-down dinner in this part of Laguna Niguel, doesn't hold right now. That assumption comes back sometime in 2027, whenever Good Boy actually opens its doors. Until then, the reservation you're looking for is more likely to be a to-go order from a four-table spot on Crown Valley Parkway than a table at the corner of Golden Lantern and Camino Del Avion.
If you're weighing what a season like this means for a neighborhood you're watching more closely, Tim Smith Real Estate Group tracks these shifts as part of daily work in Laguna Niguel and the rest of coastal Orange County. Reach out when you're ready to talk about what's actually happening on the ground here.
