Walk the Village stretch of East Coast Highway this month and the space that used to hold Mayur Cuisine of India is sitting empty, its Indian dinner menu gone from the window. Now it's next in line for something built on a different premise entirely: a restaurant that wants your business at 9 a.m. as much as it wants it at 9 p.m.
White Rooster, the coastal California concept from chef-owner Michael Campbell, is opening its second location at 2931 East Coast Highway, first reported by WhatNow, an Orange County restaurant and retail news outlet. The brand calls its food "Comida Californiana," a description that covers smoke-kissed proteins, blue corn, house-made salsas, and citrus-forward plates built around Campbell's two decades cooking in kitchens from Barcelona to San Francisco. He's also a co-founder of Portland's Sustainable Seafood Summit and currently runs Pacific Pearl Café and Capas Tacos elsewhere in South Orange County. The original White Rooster opened in Dana Point on January 16, 2026, and serves daily from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., covering brunch, lunch, happy hour, and dinner without a break in service.
That last detail matters more than the menu does if you actually live near this block, because it points to something this stretch of the Village has been doing this year: trading destination dinner spots for storefronts that never really close.
The Address Next Door Hasn't Moved Since 2013
Foretti's CDM sits at 2929 East Coast Highway, close enough to the incoming White Rooster that you could probably smell both kitchens from the same parking spot. Thad Foret opened it in 2013 as a wood-fired Neapolitan pizza spot certified by the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana, and it's been serving the same concept from the same address for thirteen years. Foret himself has more than three decades in Newport Beach hospitality.
Put those two addresses side by side and you get a small, specific fact about this one block: one storefront has run the same concept for thirteen years, and the one immediately next to it has just changed hands. That's not a citywide trend. It's a two-door data point. But it's the kind of thing you only notice if you've walked that stretch enough times to register what's supposed to be there.
A quick locator for anyone trying to picture the block:
- 2929 East Coast Highway — Foretti's CDM, wood-fired Neapolitan pizza since 2013
- 2931 East Coast Highway — the former Mayur Cuisine of India, now incoming White Rooster
- 3201 East Pacific Coast Highway — Bandera, Hillstone Restaurant Group's rotisserie chicken concept
- 3344 East Coast Highway — SOTA, the Japanese restaurant open since July 2012, listed as temporarily closed as of this summer
- 3801 East Coast Highway — Five Crowns and its gastropub SideDoor, reopened in its current form in 2009
A Second Vacancy Down the Block
SOTA's situation adds weight to the pattern. The restaurant has run at 3344 East Coast Highway since it was established in July 2012, on a traditional split-shift schedule: lunch from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., then a dinner seating from 5 to 9 p.m., with a gap in between when the doors were closed. As of this summer, its Yelp listing shows the restaurant as temporarily closed. That split-shift structure is the classic sit-down dinner destination format, the kind of restaurant you plan an evening around rather than wander into on your way somewhere else.
Whatever eventually fills that space, the fact that two restaurants built around that dinner-destination model have gone dark on the same short run of highway this year is worth noticing on its own. Neither closure by itself would mean much. Together, they're the reason the arrival of a continuous-hours concept like White Rooster reads less like an isolated opening and more like a shift in what this part of the Village expects from its restaurants.
Campbell has been direct about what he's building instead. In describing the philosophy behind the concept, he put it simply: "White Rooster is everyday food, done with care, depth and chef-driven flavor." Everyday, in this context, means a restaurant designed to be part of your Tuesday morning as easily as your Friday night, not a place you reserve a table at three weeks out.
What Continuous Hours Actually Change on the Sidewalk
If the Dana Point hours carry over, the Corona del Mar location would be open from breakfast through last call, seven days a week. That's a different rhythm than a restaurant that unlocks its doors at 5 p.m. and locks them again at 9. A dinner-only restaurant makes its block busy for a few hours a night. An all-day restaurant makes the sidewalk in front of it look occupied at 10 a.m., dead-quiet 2 p.m., and full again by 6, on a loop, every day of the week.
That's not a small distinction if you live within walking distance and think about this stretch of East Coast Highway as part of your daily route rather than an occasional dinner plan. Right now the block still runs on the older model in most directions. SideDoor's happy hour, Monday through Thursday from 4:30 to 6 p.m., is built around the same evening-anchored logic that's defined Five Crowns since it reopened as a gastropub in 2009. Bandera, the Hillstone rotisserie concept up the street, keeps a similar dinner-forward rhythm. White Rooster's approach, if it plays out the way its Dana Point flagship does, would be the outlier on this particular run of highway, not the norm.
No official opening date has been announced for the Corona del Mar location as of this writing, so there's no menu preview or hours confirmation to pass along yet. Whatever signage goes up at 2931 in the coming months, and whenever the doors actually open, will tell residents more than any press release does. Keep an eye on the storefront next time you're walking past Foretti's.
For now, the honest version of the story is this: Corona del Mar's East Coast Highway isn't just swapping one restaurant for another. It's swapping a service model. The block still has its anchors, the ones that have taught residents exactly when to show up for happy hour or a pizza. But the newest tenant on the strip is betting that this part of the Village wants a restaurant that's simply open, all day, every day, rather than one you plan around.
If you've got a read on what SOTA's next chapter might look like, or you've already spotted activity behind the glass at 2931, that's exactly the kind of neighborhood knowledge that never shows up in a search result. bouHAUS spends as much time walking these blocks as we do studying what's for sale on them, and we're always glad to talk shop about either one.
