The Pier Restaurant Still Isn't Open. Everything Around It Is.

Walk to the end of the Huntington Beach Pier this month and you will pass a storefront that has sat behind construction fencing since a lease promised it would open by May 2022. Walk six blocks inland to Main and Olive, and you will find a dining room that opened its doors on August 12. Drive two miles east to Warner Avenue, and a fourth Orange County location of a fast-growing pizzeria is moving into a suite that already burned through one concept since 2022.

Same city. Same four-year stretch. Wildly different clocks.

That gap is the actual story in Huntington Beach right now, more than any single opening or event. The pier project, the one everyone assumes is the bellwether for how the city's food scene is doing, has become the slowest thing happening in town. Everything with real momentum is happening somewhere else.

Four years, three state agencies, and a $1.3 million bond

The pier restaurant has a name now: Huntington's on the Pier. It has had a name for a while, actually. Former mayor Keith Bohr and longtime Huntington Beach architect Jeff Bergsma won the city's bid for the space, with a lease that targeted a May 2022 opening. That date came and went, and four years of permitting followed.

In January of this year, Bohr came back to the city council asking for a $1.3 million bond, a financial guarantee meant to protect the city if the project falls through entirely. The council approved it, but not without friction. Councilman Pat Burns said on the record that the whole project felt shaky to him. Councilman Chad Williams raised a sharper concern, suggesting the city might be renewing a lease on a contract that was already in default given how long the site had sat unused.

"I want Keith to get going so he can open up by the end of summer hopefully."

That was Councilman Butch Twining at the same January meeting, trying to move the process along rather than reopen it. Bohr's own explanation for the delay points to permitting across three state agencies, the OC Health Department, and multiple city departments, a regulatory stack that a downtown storefront simply doesn't face.

The scale of what's actually being built explains some of the slowness. City documents describe a 250-square-foot kitchen addition, two outdoor patios totaling 630 square feet, and an expanded public restroom facility, all shoehorned into a structure sitting at the end of a public pier over open water. The finished restaurant is planned to seat roughly 50 guests indoors, another 25 on a climate-controlled patio, and 10 more near the restrooms, with a "California coastal casual" menu of tacos, burgers, seafood, and salads. Under the lease terms, Bohr's operation can run for nearly 50 years if every extension option gets exercised, and the new rent of $5,500 comes in about 32 percent higher than what the city was previously collecting from the space.

None of that is bad planning. It is just a different category of project than what's opening everywhere else in town this month.

The restaurant that actually moved isn't on the pier

Champagnes Kitchen has been part of Orange County's dining scene since 1989, when Rand McDevitt and Tina Voso opened the original bistro and deli in Newport Beach. They ran it for decades before retiring and selling the brand in 2021 to Matt and Winnona Tobey, who kept the family-owned identity while building on it. Winnona is a Culinary Institute of America graduate now overseeing the kitchen, and Matt brings operational experience from stints at Urth Caffé, Wild Goose, and Starwood Hotels.

On August 12, that partnership opened its biggest expansion yet in a 3,950-square-foot space at 200 Main Street, right at the corner of Main and Olive Avenue in downtown Huntington Beach. The corner had been an IHOP for more than 26 years. Where the Newport Beach flagship built its name on counter-service breakfasts and deli sandwiches, the Huntington Beach location adds full dinner service, a six-seat liquor bar, and an espresso program built around local roaster Moon Goat Coffee. It's now open for breakfast, brunch, dinner, and cocktails, with both indoor and outdoor seating.

A block-and-a-half of downtown Huntington Beach just went from pancakes to a full evening cocktail bar in the time it took the pier's permits to clear a single state agency.

The same week, a different kind of expansion

Six miles inland at the Goldenwest and Warner intersection, a suite in the Goldenwest & Warner shopping center, a 129,591-square-foot open-air plaza anchored by Stater Bros., CVS, and Ross, has cycled through concepts fast. Local Kitchens, a Bay Area micro-food-hall brand, made its Southern California debut there in October 2022 before closing its Huntington Beach unit. Now Prime Pizza is moving into that same suite at 7151 Warner Ave, its fourth Orange County location.

Prime Pizza's Orange County run started in November 2025 with a Mission Viejo shop, its ninth store overall and first in the county, followed by a Brea location in February 2026. In January 2026, the chain partnered with private equity firm CapitalSpring to fund a multi-unit growth push aimed at eventually surpassing 40 locations nationwide. The Warner Avenue intersection itself sees roughly 71,000 average daily vehicles and sits directly across from Ocean View High School, the kind of traffic count that makes a suite like this attractive to a chain scaling this fast.

The pattern across both openings is the same. Neither operator waited on a coastal permit review measured in years. Both moved into existing commercial space and opened within a normal buildout timeline.

The Pier Project vs. the Two New Kitchens

What actually filled a summer weekend

The Lexus US Open of Surfing ran daily from July 25 through August 2 on the beach south of the pier, free to attend as always, with professional heats, live music, and the usual crush of visitors that comes with it. That window has already closed for the year, but the crowd it drew is a reminder of how much foot traffic the downtown corridor absorbs in a normal summer month, foot traffic that a functioning pier restaurant would presumably be built to catch.

The Huntington Beach International Surfing Museum's Surfin' Sundays keeps running at Pier Plaza on its usual free format: concerts from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., with vendors set up all day Saturday and from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday. Proceeds go back into the concert series and the museum's programs, and it remains the one piece of the downtown calendar that doesn't depend on any permit clearing.

Further out on the calendar, the Surf City Artisan Street Fair keeps a steady cadence at Pier Plaza, Main Street and Pacific Coast Highway, running 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. with artisans, musicians, and food vendors. The remaining August dates land on the 28th, 29th, and 30th, with the fair continuing into September and beyond on a similar Friday-through-Sunday rhythm.

Reading the two clocks together

None of this means the pier restaurant is a lost cause. Bohr's team has said publicly they're eager to start construction once the city releases the outstanding permits, and the $1.3 million bond exists specifically so the city isn't left holding the risk if the project stalls further. It may well open before the year is out.

But the lesson for anyone who already lives in Huntington Beach isn't about the pier. It's about where to actually watch for change. The postcard location, the one every visitor photographs, has been the slowest-moving real estate in the entire city for four years running. The blocks around it, Main Street, Warner Avenue, the ordinary commercial corridors that don't require a Coastal Commission hearing, are where the actual investment keeps landing, month after month, with far less fanfare.

If you're the kind of resident who tracks these shifts because you're curious about where the neighborhood is headed, or because you're weighing what a corner like Main and Olive means for the blocks around it, that's a conversation worth having with someone who watches this coastline for a living. Susie McKibben works Newport Harbor and the surrounding coastal Orange County communities, including Huntington Beach, and is always glad to talk through what a changing corridor might mean for your own plans. Schedule a Private Consultation whenever you're ready.