Drive Avenida de la Carlota past El Toro Road this month and you will see two clocks running on the same half mile of pavement. On one side, a strip retail space that used to house GameCraft Brewery is being fitted out for a new tenant. On the other, sixty-eight acres of flattened mall pad sit behind a construction fence, waiting on a groundbreaking that keeps sliding further out. Same street. Very different timelines.
That gap is the actual story in Laguna Hills right now, not the mall redevelopment everyone keeps writing about. The food and drink options opening for residents this year are not coming from the master plan. They are coming from operators who did not wait for it.
What's Actually Opening This Year
Docent Brewing is bringing its fourth Southern California taproom to 23301 Avenida de la Carlota, Suite C, in the space GameCraft Brewery left behind. Co-founders Brian Hendon and Bryan Giesen told a local outlet in February they were hoping to open by May 1. That date came and went. By mid-May, Docent's own site still listed the Laguna Hills taproom as coming soon, which is a normal slip for a buildout in a new market rather than a red flag, but it is worth knowing if you have been checking every few weeks expecting to find the doors open.
If you have visited Docent's other locations in San Juan Capistrano, San Clemente, or Carlsbad Village, you already know the pattern. The kitchen runs a Korean Reuben that shows up on every menu, alongside smash burgers, tacos, and bowls that rotate by location. The beer list is where the brand has actually built its name. Its Super Tonic coffee stout has picked up five gold medals across the Great American Beer Festival and the San Diego International Beer Competition, and its Double Nickels pale ale took gold at the 2026 World Beer Cup after gold in 2024 and silver back in 2018. That is not a brewery still finding its footing. That is an established operator choosing an existing GameCraft-shaped vacancy over waiting for new construction across the street.
Docent is not showing up into a void. Ironwood, a New American restaurant with a full bar, an open kitchen, and an enclosed heated patio facing the Saddleback Mountains, has already given South Orange County residents a sit-down option without a drive to the coast. The Laguna Hills Certified Farmers Market still runs its regular Friday morning slot, the kind of weekly fixture that does not need a grand opening to matter to the people who show up for it.
The Village Is Still Running on a 2028 Clock
The mall side of the street tells a much slower story. Laguna Hills Mall lost its anchors in stages, Sears in 2014, then Macy's and JCPenney by 2018, before closing entirely on December 31, 2018. The last of the structure came down in 2023. In 2022, the city approved a mixed-use replacement called the Village at Laguna Hills: housing, hotels, retail, and a community park across sixty-eight acres of freeway frontage.
Then the plan changed again. In January 2025, the developer, MGP Fund X Laguna Hills, asked the city to reopen the development agreement, citing shifts in demand for commercial office space and changing retail and entertainment patterns. The city council formed an ad hoc committee that April to work through the request, and by August 2025 staff had been directed to begin formally reviewing a modified application. The revised numbers that came out of that process call for as many as 1,456 homes with a mix of apartments, townhomes, and single-family units, two hotels instead of the one originally planned, roughly 150,000 square feet of retail, and 200 affordable units set aside for seniors and veterans. The city approved 180 of those senior apartments in September 2025.
A fiscal impact analysis dated April 21, 2026 found the modified plan would actually generate a higher annual surplus for the city's general fund than the version approved in 2022, mostly through property tax, sales tax, and hotel occupancy tax. That is a reasonable case for the changes. It does not change the construction calendar. Approvals for the modified project are targeted for completion around the turn of 2025 into 2026, with construction expected to start sometime between mid-2026 and early 2027. Under that schedule, full occupancy for the first phases is not projected before 2028.
None of that is a knock on the project. Redeveloping sixty-eight acres of dead retail next to Interstate 5 is genuinely hard, and a plan that adds senior and veteran housing while dropping office space nobody currently wants is arguably a better plan than the one it is replacing. But if you have been waiting for that corner to turn into somewhere to grab dinner, the honest answer is not yet, and probably not next year either.
What the Gap Actually Tells You
This is the part that is easy to miss if you only follow the mall headlines. Laguna Hills is not sitting still while it waits on a master plan. Its food and gathering scene is filling in from the edges, one lease at a time, on a much faster clock than the redevelopment across the street. Docent chose an existing brewery footprint instead of waiting for space to open up inside the Village. Ironwood built a following on its own patio years before the mall site had a finalized design. The farmers market has been running its Friday routine the entire time, regardless of what was happening behind the chain-link fence a few blocks away.
That pattern is worth noticing if you have lived here long enough to remember when the mall was still standing. Laguna Hills does not wait for one big reveal. It fills gaps as they open, and the businesses that do well here tend to be the ones willing to move into a space that already exists rather than hold out for something new to be built around them. If you want a read on where the city's actual center of gravity sits day to day, the fenced-off acreage next to the freeway is not where to look. The strip centers that keep pulling repeat customers are.
That also means the eventual payoff of the Village project, whenever it lands, is not the only thing shaping how this city feels to live in right now. The corner of Avenida de la Carlota and El Toro Road will someday be a walkable node with a park, two hotels, and a specialty grocer. Right now it is a construction fence next to a brewery that is actually about to open. Both of those things are true. Only one of them affects your Friday night this year.
What to Actually Plan For
If you are deciding where to take out-of-town guests or grab a low-key dinner this fall, here is where things stand in Laguna Hills right now:
- Open today: Ironwood, for a sit-down meal with Saddleback Mountain views from the patio. The Laguna Hills Certified Farmers Market, running Friday mornings as it has for years.
- Opening soon: Docent Brewing's fourth taproom, bringing its Korean Reuben and gold-medal beer list into the former GameCraft space on Avenida de la Carlota, past its original May target but reportedly still on track.
- Still years out: Village Park, the two planned hotels, and the roughly 150,000 square feet of new retail on the old mall site, none of which is expected to open before 2028.
The freeway-facing acreage gets the headlines because it carries the bigger number. But the useful read on Laguna Hills this year is happening one storefront at a time, mostly without waiting on a ribbon-cutting from the Village at all.
Watching how a city fills its gaps, ahead of or instead of a master plan, tells you almost as much about a neighborhood's direction as the plan itself. That is the kind of read Matt Whitcomb tracks block by block across South Orange County, because it shapes property values years before the headline project ever breaks ground. If you are weighing a move in Laguna Hills or anywhere nearby, reach out for a free home valuation and an honest picture of what is actually happening in your neighborhood, not just what has been announced.
