Walk Second Street this month and you'll count new awnings on nearly every block between Livingston and Bay Shore. A tea shop where the fried chicken place used to be. An ice cream counter in the old poke spot. A dinner house glowing inside a bank building that hasn't taken a deposit in years. The easy read is that Belmont Shore is having a food scene moment, a wave of fresh energy on the fourteen-block strip.
That read isn't wrong so much as it's incomplete. Several of this year's new tenants are multi-location groups moving into spaces vacated by other established operators. Anna's Pizza Joint is a clear exception.
Five Storefronts, Three of Them Chain-to-Chain
Start with the corner of Second and Pacific Coast Highway, where Sweetgreen opened its first Long Beach location on January 20, a national salad chain headquartered in Los Angeles since 2016, filling a unit in the Marketplace complex just west of Trader Joe's.
A few blocks in, Chagee Modern Tea House opened February 11 at 5246 E. 2nd St. That address had been a Dave's Hot Chicken until recently, so this wasn't an empty space finding a tenant. It was one chain replacing another. Chagee isn't a small operation either: the brand runs roughly 6,000 locations worldwide and trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker CHA.
Down at Second and Roycroft, Zarape Long Beach opened in early February, taking over a space Rubio's had held for nearly two decades before its lease wound down. Zarape is owned by Oneismo Mendez and operates out of West Hollywood. Its arrival puts three separate Mexican concepts within a short walk of each other on the same corridor.
Then there's Sorry Not Sorry Creamery, which opened April 2 in the former Sweetfin space after that chain closed the prior May. Another swap, another brand with locations beyond the Shore.
The fifth address is the most visually dramatic. South of Nick's opened for dinner service on June 15 and added lunch two weeks later, inside a restored 1929 Spanish Colonial building at 5354 E. 2nd St. that spent its most recent years as a Citibank branch. The building looks like a genuine local discovery. The tenant is not: South of Nick's already operates in Laguna Beach and San Clemente, and its parent company, Nick's Restaurant Group, runs Nick's on 2nd a few blocks away.
Add it up and three of these five spaces changed hands from one established, multi-unit operator to another. Sweetgreen is new construction rather than a swap, but it's still a chain with headquarters and a national footprint moving in, not an independent testing a concept for the first time.
The One Name That Isn't Backed by a Chain
The exception is Anna's Pizza Joint, which opened in March at 5351 Second St., near the corner of Santa Ana Avenue. It's the only genuinely new, single-location concept in this year's wave, and it comes from someone the Shore already half-knows.
Curtis Fullerton grew up around Schooner or Later, the waterfront brunch spot his mother opened, and later became a business partner in Anna's Joint, the bar and sandwich shop Elliot Lewis (who also owns Catalyst Cannabis) built downtown near Pine and Fifth. Fullerton took the ideas he'd been developing for years and built his own shop on Second Street, one with, in his words reported by the Long Beach Post, a Belmont Shore personality rather than a copy of the downtown location.
Right now the menu is New York-style pies, with Detroit-style and gluten-free Grandma Squares coming soon, plus ice cream from Seaside Creamery and sandwiches built on garlic knot bread. It's the kind of shop that could only open here because someone already had roots here. Its local roots distinguish it from several of this year's other arrivals.
What Hasn't Turned Over
The churn is easier to read against what's stayed put. Saint & Second occupies a spot the Hoffman family has run for more than seventy years. Legends Bar + Grill has operated since 1979. Murphy's Pub, tucked above street level next to the Belmont Athletic Club, opened in 1982. Domenico's has been serving the same Italian-American menu long enough that regulars stop counting the years.
None of those businesses are chains expanding into the Shore. They're long-standing fixtures alongside this year's new arrivals. The Sweetfin and Rubio's spaces have since turned over to new tenants.
What's Actually Happening on the Street This Month
Beyond the storefronts, September is a full calendar month for the corridor. The 34th Annual Belmont Shore Car Show was scheduled for Sunday, September 13, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., with Second Street scheduled to close to through traffic between Livingston and Bay Shore. The event listing described several hundred vehicles, a beer garden, live music, and a Bell UH-1 helicopter open for climb-aboard viewing; it names the Belmont Shore Business Association as producer, with support from the Port of Long Beach and local sponsors.
If you missed Stroll & Savor, the Business Association's tasting-ticket series through Second Street's restaurants, the 2026 season already wrapped on its third and final date, August 19 and 20. More than forty businesses took part in the July round, everything from Roe Seafood and Domenico's to counter spots like Anna's Pizza Joint and El Pollo Loco. There isn't another round until next summer.
What's still up is the 2nd Street Scene, a street-wide art exhibit and public vote running from August 20 through October 17. More than forty pieces from local artists are posted in storefronts and open spaces along the corridor, each with a QR code for passersby to vote on their favorite. It turns a normal walk down Second into something closer to an open-air gallery for the next several weeks, and it costs nothing to take part.
Reading the Corridor, Not Just Shopping It
None of this makes Second Street worse. A national tea brand and a growing taco group both bet real capital on this specific fourteen-block stretch, which says something about how the corridor is valued. Among the six openings discussed here, Anna's Pizza Joint is identified as a single-location concept. The other five include multi-location groups and Sweetgreen's new-construction location.
That's worth knowing next time you're deciding where to grab dinner on Second Street, or which new sign is actually new versus recently rebranded.
We watch this corridor closely because it's the same street our clients live two blocks from, walk their dogs down, and ask us about when they're weighing a move. If you're curious what a Belmont Shore home is worth against everything changing at street level right now, Cynthia Voss & Nathan Walter would be glad to walk you through it. Request a free home valuation whenever you're ready.
