For the better part of five years, the loudest conversation about downtown Huntington Beach has been about a bait and tackle shop that stopped selling bait and tackle. The old Let's Go Fishing stand at 21 Main Street was supposed to become a restaurant called Huntington's on the Pier, with the deal tracing back to 2021 and an original opening target of May 2022. It didn't happen on schedule. Permits stalled, three state agencies got involved, and the project became the kind of thing residents mention with a shrug when asked what's new downtown. The restaurant's own site now lists a completion target of fall 2026, which means it may finally open around the same weeks you're reading this.
Here's the part that gets missed while everyone watches that one storefront: the actual texture of a week in Huntington Beach changed more in the past year than the pier saga suggests, and almost none of it required a council vote.
What the council actually argued about
The pier restaurant deserves its own explanation, because the delay says something true about how slowly the visible stuff moves here even when everyone wants it to work. Former Mayor Keith Bohr is the one building it, alongside longtime local architect Jeff Bergsma. In January, Bohr went back to the city council to secure a $1.3 million bond meant to protect the city if his project falls through, and the meeting got tense. Councilmember Chad Williams raised the possibility that the city should reassess the whole deal rather than approve the bond, pointing out that fifteen months of rent abatement had passed without construction starting.
"We might be executing a term on a contract that might be in default."
Councilman Don Kennedy put it more bluntly, warning the city was setting a precedent that deadlines don't really mean anything. Councilmember Twining took the more forgiving position, saying he wanted Bohr "to get going so he can open up by the end of summer hopefully." Bohr's own explanation was that his team had to work through the OC Health Department and three separate state agencies before they could even pull permits, on top of the original 2022 delays.
That is a fair amount of civic drama for a restaurant that will seat about fifty people inside and another thirty-five across two patios. It also means that for most of the past five years, the most-discussed downtown project has been the one residents could do the least about.
The businesses that changed the week while the pier sat empty
While that fight played out, a different kind of change was happening at street level, with no bond hearings required. Subculture, the sandwich shop known for its Dutch crunch bread, opened a second Huntington Beach location right off Main Street on PCH in April, close enough to the sand that it functions as the obvious stop between parking and the beach. Market Broiler reopened in late January with a redesigned dining room, a full three months before any of the Main Street openings, which means the seafood restaurant that's been serving Huntington Beach since 1989 has quietly had a modernized space for most of this year already.
Then came a run of May openings that did more to reshape a typical Saturday than years of pier headlines. Champagnes Kitchen opened its second location on Main Street on May 11, and it brought a detail worth noting for anyone who orders coffee before anything else: its espresso program is a partnership with Moongoat Coffee, the Costa Mesa roaster, which means a bit of Costa Mesa's food scene now runs through a Huntington Beach storefront. Down at Pacific City, Little Sister moved out from behind its speakeasy origins to become its own restaurant on May 22, built around Vietnamese and Southeast Asian street food with European technique layered in. A week earlier, The Lighthouse took over the upper deck at Pacific City, a genuinely notable addition given its history. The original Lighthouse opened in Hermosa Beach in 1949 and hosted musicians like Miles Davis and Chet Baker before becoming a filming location for La La Land. Its Pacific City version keeps the Sunday Jazz Brunch tradition going, along with reggae and rock sets through the week.
The most personal reopening for longtime residents was probably Dwight's Beach Concessions, which has operated at the beach since 1932. A fire had shut it down, and its May reopening after a full renovation means the stand's cheese strips, the kind of beach snack that shows up in decades of family photos, are back in rotation. Sea Salt at the Beach reopened the same window with a new saloon bar and a weekend Boot Scootin' Brunch, leaning into the honky-tonk identity it's built its name on.
None of these openings needed a $1.3 million bond or a council hearing. They needed a lease and a build-out, and together they did more to change where locals actually eat on a given Tuesday than the one project everyone was watching.
The season that didn't end when summer did
Two changes this year are worth flagging specifically because they don't behave like typical seasonal openings that fade by September.
Sea Legs on the Beach started its season on March 7 and is running through October, a longer stretch than usual, timed to its tenth anniversary and to the country's 250th anniversary. The format has stayed recognizable: an 80s Beach Brunch on Saturdays that turns into live music, and a Sunday lineup that starts as Brunch with the Beatles before shifting into Reggae Sundays with acts from the Cali Roots scene. Because the run extends into October, it overlaps directly with the fall's other big date on the calendar, which matters for planning purposes below.
The International Surfing Museum's WSL50 exhibition opened July 23, timed to land right before the U.S. Open of Surfing kicked off two days later. The more lasting change is where the museum itself is headed. It's relocating to a larger space at the Main Street Library, which means one more downtown foot-traffic pattern is about to shift: a museum visit and a library visit become the same trip.
What changes in the next few weeks
The one date every resident should already have marked is October 2 through 4, when the Pacific Airshow returns to Huntington City Beach. Show Center sits on Pacific Coast Highway between Twin Dolphin Street and Beach Boulevard, and the event is free to watch from public stretches of sand, though the ticketed precinct offers better sightlines and includes performer signings. Parking gets difficult fast. The city's own guidance points people toward the Pier Plaza lot and the Main Promenade parking structure, and a free bike valet operates on 5th Street for anyone who can get there on two wheels instead of four. If you live within walking distance, this is the weekend to plan around rather than drive through.
By the time the airshow wraps and Huntington's on the Pier finally opens its doors, whenever in the next few months that turns out to be, it will be arriving into a downtown that already rebuilt itself without it. That's the actual story of this year here. The project everyone watched moved the slowest. The ones nobody was arguing about changed the week.
If you're weighing a move within Huntington Beach or elsewhere along the coast and want a read on what a particular pocket of town actually offers day to day, not just what the listing says, Mark Ayoub is happy to walk through it with you. Schedule a consultation whenever the timing works for you.
