Bacari, Brodard, and Bixby Village Aren't the Same Story

Drive from Naples to the 405 corridor to the shopping plaza at Second and PCH in the same week and you will hear the same sentence from three different people: Long Beach is having a restaurant moment. It is a tidy way to describe what is happening. It is also wrong in a way that matters if you actually eat here.

These are not three chapters of one trend. They are three separate real estate stories that happen to be landing in the same calendar year, each following its own logic, each answering to a different kind of demand. Understanding why they are unconnected tells you more about how this city actually eats than lumping them together ever could.

Naples Gets a Two-Story Bet on a Slower Neighborhood

Bacari opened its Long Beach location on June 1 at 5620 E. 2nd St., taking over the two-story building that spent years as Michael's on Naples. The Los Angeles-based small-plates group, run by brothers Danny and Robert Kronfli with executive chef Lior Hillel, didn't just lease the space and hang a new sign. Coverage of the buildout describes a full transformation into a Mediterranean villa feel layered with old-world European brasserie touches: rich wood flooring, exposed timber beams, textured plaster, arched masonry, vintage-style chandeliers. About the only physical trace of Michael's left is the marble bartop on the rooftop.

That is a meaningful amount of capital and design work to sink into an existing building on a residential-scale street in Belmont Shore, rather than build new. It signals something specific about how Bacari reads this stretch of 2nd Street: not as an emerging corridor that needs discovering, but as an already-established, walkable neighborhood worth adapting to. Bacari has done this kind of build in Playa del Rey and Glendale before, so the Naples location isn't a bet on the concept working here. It's a bet that a slower, established Belmont Shore crowd will show up for a destination restaurant inside a building they already recognize.

Seventh and Bellflower Trades a Pharmacy for Four Chains

Three and a half miles away, near Cal State Long Beach and the Tibor Rubin VA Medical Center, a completely different mechanism produced a completely different result. The CVS at Bixby Village Plaza closed in 2023 and was demolished by early 2024. Property owner Westar Associates rebuilt the pad from scratch and, in a March 2026 announcement, confirmed four new tenants moving into the finished building: California Fish Grill, The Melt, Luna Grill, and Urbane Café.

By late summer, California Fish Grill and The Melt were both confirmed open, according to Bixby Village Plaza's own tenant updates. Luna Grill and Urbane Café were still finishing interior work as of the most recent reporting, with no confirmed opening dates published. This is a different kind of restaurant news than what happened in Belmont Shore. Nobody is renovating a beloved institution here. A developer replaced a "functionally obsolete" single-tenant pharmacy, in Westar's own words, with four fast-casual pads sized for high turnover near a university and a hospital. The Melt's arrival marks the chain's first Long Beach location. Luna Grill's nearest existing spot is in Lakewood. This is chain infill responding to foot traffic counts, not a neighborhood rediscovering itself.

A Little Saigon Landmark Picks the Retail Complex, Not Downtown

The third story belongs to Brodard, the Fountain Valley restaurant that has been a fixture of Little Saigon's food scene since 1996. Brodard is expanding into the 2nd & PCH retail complex, taking the space that formerly housed Tocaya. As of the most recent update from a 2nd & PCH representative, there is still no specific opening date, only a confirmation that it is coming sometime in 2026.

What makes this worth separating from the other two is where Brodard chose to land. It did not pick Retro Row, downtown, or any of the neighborhoods usually associated with Long Beach's more adventurous dining scene. It picked a large, mall-adjacent retail complex on PCH, the kind of location built for visibility and parking rather than walkability or neighborhood character. That is a business decision rooted in Brodard's own expansion logic as an established Orange County brand looking for its next high-traffic address, not a reflection of anything shifting inside Long Beach itself.

Here is what those three stories look like side by side:

The Corridor That Didn't Need Any of This

The clearest evidence that Long Beach's food scene isn't one connected story is the part of the city that didn't participate at all. Retro Row and the surrounding East Village pizza cluster already has its own gravity. Between The 4th Horseman, Milana's, Baby Bros. Pizza, Due Fiori, and Marlena, that stretch built a dense, independent pizza identity over the past decade without a developer redoing a pad or a national chain deciding it was time to expand there.

Two more data points reinforce the same pattern. Mooney's Pizza, taking over the former Huff's Family Restaurant space at 8105 E. Wardlow Rd., originally targeted a fall 2025 opening. As of the most recent update, owner Hal Mooney's buildout was still underway, with the space looking more like a finished restaurant but no new confirmed date announced. Downtown, Waldo's Pizza made the opposite move: after operating as a pop-up, chef Waldo Stout moved the concept into a permanent kitchen in Downtown Long Beach. Neither of these had anything to do with a redeveloped shopping pad or an out-of-town brand's expansion calendar. They ran on the timeline that independent restaurant buildouts actually run on, which is to say, slower and less predictable than a corporate press release.

What This Actually Means If You Eat Here

The mistake is assuming Long Beach has a single restaurant scene that rises and falls together. It doesn't. Belmont Shore moves on adaptive reuse of buildings people already love. East Long Beach moves on developer-driven chain infill tied to institutional foot traffic from CSULB and the VA. The 2nd & PCH corridor moves on outside brands picking Long Beach as their next high-visibility address. Retro Row and downtown move on independent operators building at their own pace, with their own delays.

If you live near Naples, Bacari's opening genuinely changes your Tuesday night options. If you live near Bixby Village Plaza, the story is about lunch rotation near campus, not date night. If you're watching 2nd & PCH for Brodard, you're waiting on a corporate timeline with no public date attached yet. Treating all four as one wave means missing what's actually different about each one, and missing that a slow build-out on Wardlow Road has nothing to do with a demolished CVS three miles away.

That fragmentation is not a flaw in the city's food scene. It's a fairly accurate reflection of how a place with this many distinct pockets actually works, one lease, one demolition, one renovation at a time, each on its own clock.

If you're weighing what a neighborhood's day-to-day rhythm actually feels like before making a move within Long Beach or the surrounding Westside, that kind of block-by-block texture is exactly what Lisa Potier helps clients sort through. Reach out for a conversation about what a specific pocket of the city is really like to live in, or start with a Get a Free Home Valuation if you're curious what your own corner of the map is worth right now.