Four restaurants defined Costa Mesa's dining year, and every one of them landed exactly where the city's commercial geography said it would. Maleza opened for dinner at The CAMP on September 12. Highball and its hidden sushi room, Naisho Omakase, opened at a Bristol Street shopping center back in March. Zov's, the Karamardian family's 40-year Mediterranean restaurant group, is taking over a shuttered storefront on East 17th Street before the end of the year. Pacific Pearl Cafe opened a second location inside The Met on Anton Boulevard in January.
Look at that list and a pattern shows up fast. The reservation-required, chef-driven concepts keep landing on Bristol Street. The walk-in, family-run, decades-old concepts keep landing on 17th Street. That split isn't random, and once you see it, you'll know exactly which street to check depending on what kind of night you're planning.
The CAMP's Openings, One at a Time
The CAMP has spent 2026 rolling out six planned grand openings, and it has done it in a specific order: refresh first, prove the concept, then bring in the anchor. Daydrift's café got a refresh early in the year. Chafinity Matcha followed. Maleza, the biggest name of the bunch, came last.
Maleza is TMC Hospitality's first standalone restaurant and its first Orange County project. The original opened inside the Drift Palm Springs hotel in 2023 and built its own following there before the company decided it was ready to exist outside a resort. Executive chef Marco Arreguín leads the Costa Mesa kitchen. He trained in Michelin-starred kitchens, served as chef de cuisine at Taco Maria in Costa Mesa during the years it earned its star, and worked under Michael Cimarusti at Best Girl and alongside Wes Avila across Kateen, MXO, and Hecho Libre. Dinner runs 5 to 9 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday and 5 to 10 p.m. Friday through Sunday, with lunch added on September 23 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday.
TMC Hospitality's CEO Philip Bates described the choice of Costa Mesa as a chance to prove the Maleza concept works as more than a hotel amenity, calling it an opportunity to build what he described as "a true neighborhood restaurant." That's a different bet than opening a fourth location in a tourist corridor. It's a bet that a Bristol Street address, inside a campus built around independent operators, gives a single-location restaurant enough foot traffic to survive without a hotel subsidizing it.
A Sushi Counter With No Sign
Half a mile down Bristol Street, at 3033 Bristol St #117, a very different kind of restaurant opened in March. Highball is a Japanese-style cocktail bar built around the discipline of getting simple drinks exactly right. Behind it, reachable only through a locked glass door with a doorbell, sits Naisho Omakase, a 14-seat sushi counter run by chef Shimpei Shinohara, who started training in his family's restaurant at age 13.
The two spaces share a shopping center with Anjin Japanese restaurant, Capital Noodle Bar, and The Halal Guys, but neither storefront advertises what's inside. Guests choose a 12-course or 16-course tasting menu, priced at $75 and $100, and reservations run about two weeks out. Co-founders Thomas Pham and Andrew Le, along with restaurateur Shaun Ito, built the concept around a shared idea: that a cocktail bar and an omakase counter could function as one continuous experience rather than two separate businesses sharing a wall.
This is the second data point for the same pattern. Bristol Street isn't just getting more restaurants. It's getting restaurants that require planning, that reward return visits, and that depend on a curated setting to make sense. A 14-seat counter with a two-week reservation window doesn't work as a standalone strip mall tenant. It works because the landlord next door is also betting on slow, deliberate foot traffic instead of drive-by volume.
The LAB Is Getting Smaller on Purpose
The clearest sign of that landlord strategy sits directly across Bristol Street from The CAMP, at The LAB Anti-Mall. When Urban Outfitters decided to leave its anchor space rather than downsize, ownership didn't backfill it with another national chain. Linda Sadeghi, who leads The LAB, described the space being carved into new footprints ranging from 600 to 1,500 square feet, a size she called the sweet spot for smaller tenants, with a larger footprint set aside for a full-service restaurant. Six new stores were planned for the subdivided space, built around the property's original identity as a home for small, independent businesses rather than national retail.
That's the second half of the Bristol Street story. The CAMP and The LAB aren't just leasing space to whoever shows up first. They're actively editing their tenant mix toward first-and-only concepts, the kind of businesses that ask visitors to come back next Thursday rather than pass through once. A chef with a Michelin-adjacent résumé and a 14-seat omakase counter both fit that mold. A national sandwich chain doesn't.
Zov's Picks the Other Corridor
East 17th Street operates on a different logic entirely. Zov's is taking over the former Playa Mesa space at 428 E. 17th St., with the family aiming to open before the end of 2026, though no official date is set. The Karamardian family has been running Mediterranean restaurants for close to 40 years, starting with a Tustin flagship before adding locations in Irvine, Newport Coast, and San Clemente. CEO Armen Karamardian traced the entire menu back to one source: "Everything we serve traces back to my mother's kitchen."
That's a legacy family brand moving into a standalone storefront, not a curated campus. The same corridor has been filling in with smaller, everyday spots built the same way. Diner Noche, at 120 Virginia Place, serves smash burgers and New Jersey-style disco fries, with owner Ryan Jimenez cooking everything, including the fries, in beef tallow. Thyme to Eat, on Harbor Boulevard, specializes in saj, a Lebanese flatbread, with a menu built around a handful of dishes rather than a sprawling one. None of these require a reservation. None of them are betting on a two-week waitlist. They're built to catch a Tuesday night regular, not a destination diner.
Why the Map Looks Like This
Costa Mesa pioneered the anti-mall concept decades ago, and the city still leads Orange County in curated, design-forward retail districts. The CAMP and The LAB on Bristol Street, along with SOCO and The OC Mix on Hyland Avenue, all built their tenant rosters around independent operators rather than national chains, and the landlords who run them curate tenant mix as carefully as any leasing decision gets made. That curation costs more. Standard inline shop space in Costa Mesa runs $2.25 to $4.50 per square foot on a triple-net basis in 2026, and space near South Coast Plaza or in a strong restaurant endcap position pushes past $6.00. Seventeenth Street and the Eastside sit at a different price point, built for daily-needs businesses and neighborhood dining rather than flagship concepts.
That rent gap is the whole explanation. A curated campus can support a 14-seat omakase counter with a two-week reservation list because the landlord has already filtered out the businesses that need walk-in volume to survive. A standalone storefront on 17th Street can support a 40-year family restaurant or a beef-tallow smash burger counter because neither one depends on being inside a destination. Pacific Pearl Cafe threads a middle path, opening its second location inside The Met on Anton Boulevard, a mixed-use office and residential complex rather than a retail campus, serving breakfast and lunch to a built-in daytime crowd instead of competing for dinner reservations.
What's Already Open, and What's Still Coming
Open now:
- Maleza at The CAMP (2937 Bristol St), dinner nightly except Monday and Tuesday, lunch added September 23
- Highball and Naisho Omakase (3033 Bristol St #117), open since March 23
- Pacific Pearl Cafe at The Met (575 Anton Blvd), open since January 26
- Diner Noche (120 Virginia Place) and Thyme to Eat (1951 Harbor Blvd), both already serving
Still coming before the year is out:
- Zov's at 428 E. 17th St., no official date set
- The LAB's subdivided storefronts, with tenant reveals staged rather than announced all at once
If you're heading to Bristol Street, plan ahead and expect to book a table. If you're heading to 17th Street, you can still just show up.
Understanding why a neighborhood's businesses cluster where they do, and what that says about how a street actually functions day to day, is the same kind of homework we do before we list a single property in Costa Mesa. If you're curious what else that kind of local read turns up about your specific block, 1% Listing Broker is always happy to talk it through.
