The 17th Street Gap: More Restaurants, No Fish Counter Until 2027
Walk the stretch of East 17th Street between Newport Boulevard and Irvine Avenue this week and you will pass a boarded storefront that used to smell like the ocean. For almost 30 years, Santa Monica Seafood sold fish by the pound out of 154 E 17th St, the kind of place where you picked your salmon fillet and watched someone wrap it. It closed in February 2025, and the space has sat empty since, according to reporting from WhatNow OC on the vacancy.
That closure sits at the center of something worth understanding if you live here: 17th Street is running on two different clocks right now. The restaurant scene is moving fast, with new kitchens opening or refreshing almost every quarter. The retail anchors, the places where you actually buy groceries or fresh fish instead of ordering a plate, are moving on a much slower one. If you only track the fast clock, you will miss what the street is actually telling you this month.
You already know 17th Street eats well. Oak & Coal has been grilling yakitori over binchotan charcoal at 333 E 17th St since 2017, part of restaurateur Jeff Chon's small local footprint that also includes The Alley in Newport Beach and The Wayfarer here in Costa Mesa. Nine years in, that one is not new. It is the steady baseline everything else gets compared to.
What has actually changed since then is faster moving:
That is three distinct openings or reinventions inside under two years, on a corridor that was already dense with places to eat. If you are judging 17th Street by how many new reservations you can make, it looks like a street on a hot streak.
Here is where the timing gets interesting. The strip center at 333 E 17th St, the one that already houses Oak & Coal and has for nine years, is scheduled for a facade remodel this fall, according to a current LoopNet listing for available retail space there. Landlords do not typically spend on cosmetic upgrades to a building that is struggling to fill space. A facade remodel is a bet that the building's tenants are worth showing off.
Meanwhile, two blocks away, the building that actually sits vacant isn't getting any visible attention at all. That is the split worth noticing: money and momentum are flowing to the parts of 17th Street that already work, while the part that broke is stalled.
Bear Flag Fish Co, the Newport Beach seafood company founded in 2007 by lifelong fisherman Thomas "Thos" Carson, has been trying to move into the old Santa Monica Seafood space since at least last fall. The company already runs counter-service seafood spots in Newport Peninsula's Lido Village, Crystal Cove, and Huntington Beach's Pacific City, so 17th Street would be a natural fourth location and the first one to bring their "wave-to-table" model back to Eastside Costa Mesa.
But the move has not cleared the finish line. Orange County Health Care Agency records list the project as being in active review, and the most recent status update on file, from October 2025, reads simply: "Unable to Approve Plans."
| Milestone | Date |
|---|---|
| Santa Monica Seafood closes after nearly 30 years | February 2025 |
| Bear Flag Fish Co. files for approval at 154 E 17th St | Sometime before fall 2025 |
| OC Health Care Agency status update | "Unable to Approve Plans," October 2025 |
| Most recent public update | None reported since |
That gap has now stretched past eighteen months with no confirmed reopening date. If you are used to walking down for a fish counter run on a Friday, the wait has already outlasted a full restaurant lease cycle on the same street.
There is a second grocery story on 17th Street, and it is easy to conflate with the seafood counter situation because the two businesses will eventually be neighbors. Erewhon has signed a lease at 140 E 17th St, the former T-Shirts Warehouse space, according to Patch's May 2026 reporting. Per the company's own site, the store is slated to open in September 2027.
That is a different address, a different business model, and more than a year out from today. It will neighbor whichever seafood operation eventually lands at 154 E 17th St, but it will not replace a walk-in fish counter, and it will not open anytime soon.
If you are counting on either a fish market or a full-scale grocer returning to 17th Street this year, the honest math says you are waiting into 2027 at the earliest.
None of this means Eastside Costa Mesa is short on fresh food. It means the routine has shifted to different days and different spots while the corridor sorts itself out.
The SOCO Farmers' Market runs every Saturday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., rain or shine, with produce, eggs, and prepared foods from local vendors. It has become the default Saturday-morning stop for a lot of people who used to time a weekday trip to the fish counter instead.
For anyone using the walk to 17th Street as part of a daily routine rather than an errand, the Upper Newport Bay Nature Preserve sits right at the edge of the neighborhood, with more than 1,000 acres of coastal wetlands and trail access for a quieter loop than the retail strip offers.
One more thing worth knowing if you are heading to 17th Street this week specifically: the OC Fair is running through August 16, its theme this year "Your Adventure Awaits," and the fairgrounds sit close enough that overflow parking and traffic patterns shift through the neighborhood during the run. If your usual parking spot near the Promenade feels tighter than normal right now, that is likely why, and it clears up once the fair wraps in a few days.
The easy read on 17th Street this year is "more restaurants, more energy," and that read isn't wrong. But it misses the slower story sitting one storefront over: a retail anchor that closed a year and a half ago, a replacement stuck in permitting limbo with no update since last fall, and a bigger grocery fix that will not arrive until September 2027 at the earliest. Both stories are true. Only one of them shows up if you're just scrolling a list of new places to eat.
If you have questions about what any of this means for property values or timing along this stretch of Eastside Costa Mesa, Susie McKibben tracks these shifts block by block and is always glad to talk it through. Schedule a private consultation whenever you're ready.
A Newport Beach resident and consummate professional, Susie McKibben represent clients seeking top-notch representation for the sale and purchase of residential properties throughout Coastal Orange County.