The Huntington Beach Comeback Everyone Missed While Watching the Pier Restaurant
September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
Cheese strips are back on the menu at 201 Pacific Coast Highway, and if you didn't already know that mattered, you're not from around here. Dwight's Beach Concession has been slicing tortilla chips and pouring its tangy tomato-based strip sauce over them since Dwight Clapp started the business in a 6-by-9 shack with a tin box of ice and two pounds of hamburger meat. City historian Jerry Person has the receipts, literally: Dwight's made $629 in its first year. Ninety-plus years later, the stand run by Dwight's son Jack and grandson Rich caught fire on the evening of January 13, 2025, a two-alarm blaze a lifeguard spotted smoking from the roof. It reopened this year with a new look and the same recipe.
That reopening is the real story of the pier this year, and it's easy to miss because everyone's been watching a different building down the boardwalk.
If you've followed local council meetings even loosely, you know the name Keith Bohr. The former Huntington Beach mayor is the man behind Huntington's on the Pier, a planned restaurant at 21 Main Street built into the old bait and tackle shop halfway down the pier. It's meant to seat about 50 guests inside plus another 35 across two patios, with surf livestreamed from below and local art on the walls. It was supposed to open in May 2022.
It still hasn't opened.
In January 2026, Bohr came back to the city council to collect a $1.3 million bond meant to protect the city if the project falls through, and the meeting got tense. Councilman Chad Williams pushed back on approving it at all, noting the project had sat tied up since 2021 while the city collected roughly $6,500 in revenue from the space over that entire stretch, and that the restaurant had already used up 15 months of rent abatement without breaking ground. Councilman Don Kennedy put it more bluntly, warning the council against setting a precedent where "you're rewarding bad behavior." Bohr's response, delivered in a statement the same week, was that his team had worked through three state agencies and every relevant city department and never stopped pushing the project forward.
Both things can be true. The pier restaurant is real, it has a lease, an ABC beer and wine license, and an architect in longtime resident Jeff Bergsma. It is also, four years after its original opening date, still a construction timeline and not a place you can eat dinner.
Meanwhile, a few hundred feet away, things kept getting done.
Dwight's is the clearest example. Councilman Kennedy, the same one who challenged the pier restaurant's timeline, had a different tone entirely when Dwight's burned: he called it heartbreaking to see damage at "an absolute mainstay of our cherished beach" and said he couldn't wait for it to come back. It came back this year, renovated, still serving the same cheese strips, still renting out umbrellas, e-bikes, and beach cruisers the way it has for generations.
The pier itself got an upgrade too. In May 2026, Visit Huntington Beach fully funded a new colored lighting system for the pier, replacing aging infrastructure with something more reliable and flexible enough to mark holidays and community events with actual lighting design instead of the same fixed glow every night. It's a small civic project by dollar amount compared to a $1.3 million bond, but it's finished, funded, and running.
Downtown and at Pacific City, a handful of new dining spots opened this year without anywhere near the drama of the pier project:
None of these required a council vote or a bond. They just opened.
The weekly and monthly rhythm of downtown hasn't waited on any of this either. Surf City Nights closes three blocks of Main Street to cars every Tuesday afternoon for a farmers market and street fair that runs roughly 4:30 to 8:30 p.m., anchored by a certified farmers' market on Walnut Avenue alongside food vendors and live entertainment.
This month brings a specific date worth knowing if you haven't been downtown on a Friday lately. Huntington Main Street runs a themed Market on Main Street event on the third Friday of every month from April through October, and September's edition, on the 18th, is Fiesta in the Street, a Hispanic Heritage Month celebration with music, food, and color running 3 to 7 p.m., followed by an After Hours stretch from 7 to 9 p.m. for the adult crowd with drinks from local restaurants and bars.
If you'd rather browse than eat, the Surf City Artisan Street Fair sets up at Pier Plaza on recurring weekends throughout the fall, generally 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., with local artisans, musicians, and food vendors filling the plaza at Main Street and Pacific Coast Highway.
None of this is a case for or against the pier restaurant getting built. It probably will, eventually, and when it does it'll be a genuinely good addition to the pier. But the mistake is treating that one stalled project as the barometer for whether downtown Huntington Beach is moving forward.
It already is. A 90-year-old cheese strip stand survived a fire and reopened. The pier got new lights that actually work. Five restaurants opened their doors without needing a bond or a council vote. And every Tuesday, Main Street closes to cars whether or not anyone downtown is still arguing about a lease.
That's the difference between a marquee project and a neighborhood. The marquee project needs permits, hearings, and a $1.3 million insurance policy against its own delays. The neighborhood just keeps going.
If you're already living in Huntington Beach, none of this changes your Tuesday plans much beyond giving you a reason to actually go to Surf City Nights if you haven't yet, or to walk down to Dwight's for the first time since the fire. But if you've been watching this stretch of coastline from the outside and wondering what it's actually like day to day, this is closer to the truth than any headline about a stalled restaurant lease.
If you're weighing a move to this part of the coast, or you already own here and are curious what a place near this corridor is worth in today's market, the team at Kent Martin Group knows this stretch of Orange County block by block. Reach out for a free home valuation and a conversation grounded in what's actually happening here, not just what's on the agenda.
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