Walk Second Street this month and you will pass a sourdough pizza joint with its garage doors thrown open, a wine shop turned brewery, and a Mexican kitchen serving inside a converted bank. None of that is an accident of timing. Look at what has opened along the strip since March and a pattern shows up that a single restaurant announcement never reveals on its own: Belmont Shore is building two different restaurant rows on the same fourteen blocks, and they are growing at the same time for opposite reasons.
One row is getting more expensive and more composed. The other is getting faster and cheaper. Both are happening on Second Street right now, often within a few doors of each other.
The elevated Mexican cluster forming near 2nd and PCH
In June, South of Nick's opened at 5354 E. Second Street, in the historic Spanish Colonial Revival building that spent years as a Citibank branch before sitting vacant. It is Nick's Restaurant Group's second Belmont Shore address, a sibling to the long-running Nick's on 2nd a few blocks away, and the fourth location for the Irvine-based group's Mexican concept after Laguna Beach and San Clemente.
That opening did not land in isolation. Zarape, a newer arrival with roots tracing back to Hollywood, sits toward the western end of the same strip, and Viaje has already built a following nearby for the same kind of dressed-up Mexican cooking. Put those three together and Second Street now has a genuine cluster of elevated Mexican restaurants within easy walking distance of each other, the kind of concentration that usually only forms once a corridor has proven it can support a higher check average night after night.
That matters for how the street reads to a longtime resident. A single new restaurant is a data point. Three restaurants in the same category, opening and holding on within a few blocks of each other, is a signal that a specific kind of demand exists and landlords along that stretch know it.
The quick and affordable wave filling in around it
At the same time, a very different kind of business has been landing on Second Street, and it has nothing to do with a tasting menu.
Anna's Pizza Joint opened in March, run by longtime Long Beach restaurateur Curtis Fullerton, who spent two decades circling back to a pizza concept he first imagined near the water. The space keeps its garage-style doors open to the street, pours beer from Long Beach Beer Lab, and scoops frozen custard from Seaside Creamery, itself a Long Beach original.
A few weeks later, Sorry Not Sorry Creamery took over the former Sweetfin space and opened its first Long Beach location on April 2, bringing dairy sourced from a century-old farm to a spot that had sat empty since Sweetfin's closure.
By late summer, ground had broken on a Sweetgreen build-out at the southeast corner of Second Street and Pacific Coast Highway, in the Marketplace complex just west of Trader Joe's, with an opening expected in the coming months. Dave's Hot Chicken had already claimed the old Peet's Coffee space a bit earlier, another fast-casual name choosing walkable Second Street over a strip mall.
None of these are destination restaurants in the way South of Nick's is. They are the opposite kind of bet: lower price points, faster turnover, built for someone grabbing dinner on a Tuesday rather than booking a table for a birthday.
An existing business betting on the same street
The most telling move on Second Street this year did not come from a new arrival at all. Colossus Bread, the artisan bakery that opened in Belmont Shore in 2021, quietly marked its fifth anniversary this summer and used the milestone to do something bigger: expand into a full-service kitchen with real seating, with a grand reopening planned for July.
Owner Kristin Colazas Rodriguez was candid about how uncertain that stretch felt before the payoff arrived.
"I'm not gonna lie, I wasn't sure if we were going to make it."
That admission matters more than a marketing headline would. An operator who already knows the real rents, the real foot traffic, and the real slow months on this specific block chose to double down on Second Street rather than pull back. That is a different kind of vote of confidence than a chain deciding to test a new location, and it lands on the same street, in the same year, as the elevated Mexican cluster and the fast-casual wave.
What this means if you already live here
If you live in Belmont Shore, the practical upshot is that Second Street increasingly gives you two different reasons to be there.
Walk east toward the Citibank-turned-restaurant building and you have a genuine option for a slower, sit-down dinner, with South of Nick's, Zarape, and Viaje all within reach of each other. Walk toward the PCH end and you have a growing set of grab-and-go options built for a weeknight, from Anna's Pizza Joint's custard counter to whatever Sweetgreen's build-out becomes once it opens.
That split did not happen by design from any single landlord or city planning document. It happened because enough different operators independently decided the same fourteen blocks could support both bets in the same year. The Belmont Shore Business Association has spent recent seasons watching legacy retail spaces turn over into food and beverage concepts precisely because Second Street's walkability keeps drawing that kind of investment, the same instinct that keeps the corridor's summer Stroll & Savor and its Second Street Car Show drawing crowds every year.
For residents, that translates into something simple: fewer reasons to leave the neighborhood for either a nice dinner or a fast one. For a strip that has weathered its share of vacant storefronts over the years, having two different kinds of businesses compete for the same customer base at the same time is a better problem to have than the alternative.
Second Street is not finished changing. Sweetgreen has not opened its doors yet, and whatever fills the next vacancy will tell you which of these two rows is winning the bigger bet. Until then, the street already tells its own story if you know which blocks to read.
If you are watching Belmont Shore for reasons beyond dinner plans, whether you already own here or you are weighing what a home near this stretch of Second Street is really worth, Loucks Real Estate can walk you through what a walkable, evolving corridor like this one means for a property's long-term value. Reach out for an instant home valuation and a conversation grounded in what is actually happening on the ground here, not just the comps.
