"I was a regular in Zoolu for years and was aware of Creole restaurants popping up and gaining in popularity." That's how Michael Byrne, co-owner of The Saloon, explained his decision to take over the tiny building at 860 Glenneyre Street after Café Zoolu closed in 2016. He wasn't buying a failing restaurant. He was buying a seat he already loved, hoping to keep it warm for someone else's food.

Nine years and three restaurants later, the seat is still there. So is the building, a converted 1939 structure a block off Coast Highway, owned by the heir of local artist Leonard Kaplan. What hasn't stayed the same is the name on the door. Café Zoolu. Roux Creole Cuisine. Evan's Gourmet Bistro. And now, opening at the end of this summer, Bar ízi. If you've lived in Laguna long enough to remember more than one of those names, you already know the corner is trying to tell you something. Most people just haven't stopped to listen.

Four Names, One Door

Here's the sequence, in order:

1. Café Zoolu ran for decades as a neighborhood hangout before its owners, Michael Leach and his wife, retired and closed the doors in May 2016.
2. Roux Creole Cuisine opened in 2017 after a nearly $200,000 refurbishment, built a following, then closed abruptly in early 2018 when founding chef Norm Theard and the ownership split over the restaurant's direction. Leach briefly stepped back in to reprise old Zoolu dishes while the partners regrouped.
3. Evan's Gourmet Bistro, the permanent dinner-service offshoot of Chef Evan Lewis's long-running catering business, moved in and operated an evening menu of crab cakes, sea bass and BBQ shrimp before closing in August 2025.
4. Bar ízi, a small plates concept from owner Sam Rabon, is now under renovation in the same space and targeting an end-of-August or early-September 2026 debut.

That's four full identities at one address in under a decade, in a town where the building next door might not change hands in a lifetime. The easy read is bad luck, or a cursed corner. The actual pattern is more specific than that, and more useful if you're the kind of resident who wants to know what's really happening on your own street.

What Killed Roux Wasn't the Menu

Roux's collapse gets misremembered as a restaurant that couldn't make it. It wasn't. Chef Norm Theard came in with real ambition, telling a local reporter he wanted the food to "have soul," and by most accounts the room delivered. The fleur-de-lis window etchings, the Mardi Gras mask on the shelf, the script reading "Laissez les bons temps rouler" over the hallway. Regulars came back. The problem wasn't the dining room, it was the back office. Co-owner Cindy Byrne described walking in one Tuesday morning to find a large portion of the furniture and kitchen equipment gone overnight, after Theard sent a resignation letter and cleared out. The restaurant closed within the week.

What that tells you about the address is narrower than it sounds. This is a small, intimate space, the kind built around one open kitchen and a handful of counter seats, where the relationship between the chef and the people who own the walls matters more than it would in a bigger operation with more layers of management to absorb a falling out. Small footprint, small margin for a bad partnership.

The Chef Who Could Sell Out the Sawdust Festival and Still Struggle at Dinner

Evan's Gourmet is the version of this story that's easiest to misread as pure hard luck, and it's the one that actually explains the most. Chef Evan Lewis built a genuinely bustling catering and counter-service operation at the seasonal Sawdust Art Festival, the kind of business that fills a line every summer without much effort. The Thalia and Glenneyre address was supposed to be the year-round version of that success. Instead, she struggled to bring in evening clientele and closed in August 2025.

The gap between those two outcomes is the real lesson. A seasonal counter at a festival draws people who are already walking past with cash in hand and an afternoon to fill. A sit-down dinner reservation a block off Coast Highway asks something different of a customer: that they choose this specific address on a specific night, without the foot traffic of the main strip to remind them it's there. Laguna's own numbers back this up. In 2025, the town lost seven food and beverage concepts, and five of them were full-service restaurants, while lower-risk formats like coffee shops and counter service mostly persisted or replaced themselves within weeks. A talented chef with a proven catering following isn't automatically a talented dinner-house operator, and 860 Glenneyre is a small, precise stage for finding out the difference.

Why This Particular Corner Is Different

None of this means Laguna's dining scene is struggling. Quite the opposite this year. Between March and July 2026, four long-dark storefronts across town turned back on, including the historic Heisler Building at 400 South Coast Highway, now home to Noble Ace, and the stilt-perched space at 858 South Coast Highway, now Amorelia Cocina Artesanal. The long-shuttered Ti Amo building in South Laguna is becoming Truly Bagels, a sibling to Truly Pizza's own new North Laguna location in the former "3" restaurant space. Small's Smash Club replaced the decades-old Dizz's As Is, also in South Laguna. It's an active, well-capitalized moment for the town's restaurant economy.

But look at where those openings sit. Every one of them is on or immediately adjacent to Coast Highway, the corridor tourists and locals alike walk without needing a reason. Glenneyre and Thalia is one block removed, close enough to matter and far enough to require intention. That's the actual difference between this address and the ones getting the splashier headlines this year. It's not a worse location. It's a location that only rewards an operator who can build a real neighborhood following, the way Café Zoolu did for decades, rather than one who's counting on the walk-by crowd to fill seats.

What Bar ízi Is Betting On

Owner Sam Rabon's approach suggests he understands exactly which version of this address he's trying to build. According to local food writer Diane Armitage, who first reported the timeline for this opening, Rabon has reimagined the interior specifically to honor a beloved figure from Laguna's culinary past, a detail he hasn't fully revealed yet as the small plates concept nears its debut. That's a meaningful choice for this particular door. The version of this restaurant that lasted decades wasn't the one with the biggest renovation budget or the most ambitious menu. It was the one that felt like it belonged to the people who kept coming back.

Bar ízi is currently targeting an end-of-August or early-September 2026 opening, which means by the time you're reading this, the tables may already be set. If the pattern at 860 Glenneyre holds, what happens next has less to do with the food on opening night and everything to do with whether Rabon can turn a small plates concept into the kind of place a Café Zoolu regular from twenty years ago would still recognize as theirs.

For those of us who've watched this particular door change hands more than once, that's the only question worth asking before the first review goes up. Not whether the food is good. Whether the corner finally sticks.

If you're weighing a move in Laguna Beach and want a read on a neighborhood that goes beyond the surface, that's the kind of local detail worth having in your corner. Nick Hooper has spent over a decade tracking exactly this texture of the market. Schedule a free consultation to talk through what a street, a block, or a corner like this one actually tells you about a property before you make an offer.