Walk to the end of the Huntington Beach Pier this month and you will pass a boarded-up stand with a mural half-visible through the windows, still waiting for the restaurant that was supposed to open in May 2022. Ask around and you'll get three different answers about what's going on there, most of them wrong, because two different buildings on that pier have gotten tangled into one story in most people's heads.
Here's the actual shape of it. The pier's main dining building, at 1 Main Street, closed as Ruby's Diner in February 2021 after nearly three decades of milkshakes at the end of the pier. That space reopened in July 2022 as Bud & Gene's. It has been open for four years. If you have eaten at the end of the pier anytime recently, that's where you were.
The empty stand people keep asking about is a different address entirely: 21 Main Street, a former bait and tackle shop the city closed in 2021 and has been trying to hand off ever since. That's the one still boarded up. That's the one with a City Council fight attached to it.
"You're rewarding bad behavior basically."
That's Councilman Don Kennedy, at the January 20, 2026 council meeting, describing what it would mean to keep extending deadlines on a project that has been stalled since 2021.
Two Buildings, One Rumor
The confusion is understandable. Both spaces sit on the same pier, both went dark around the same time, and both involve the word "restaurant." But conflating them means residents keep waiting for something that already happened four years ago, while missing the actual, ongoing story a few hundred feet away.
City staff and multiple committees recommended Ruby's Diner take over the vacant bait shop stand back in 2021. The council at the time overrode that recommendation and instead awarded the project to former Mayor Keith Bohr, working with architect Jeff Bergsma, under the name Huntington's on the Pier. That decision is the reason 21 Main Street has sat empty for five years while 1 Main Street moved on without it.
The Contract Nobody Watched Get Signed
The lease for 21 Main Street was approved in October 2024 as part of a city council consent calendar, the batch of routine items that gets passed with a single vote and little discussion. Councilman Chad Williams has pointed out that consent calendars are also where multimillion-dollar, once-in-a-generation leases get signed without debate, and this was one of them, according to Voice of OC's reporting on the fight over the project.
The terms, once you look at them, explain a lot about why the timeline kept slipping:
- The city collects $5,500 a month in rent unless the restaurant clears $2 million a year, in which case the city gets a percentage instead
- The lease runs for close to 50 years if Bohr exercises every renewal option
- Total revenue the city has collected from the site since 2021: about $6,500
Councilman Pat Burns summed up the project's history at the same meeting: the project has been stumbling along. Bohr came before the council on January 20, 2026 to receive a $1.3 million performance bond, a financial guarantee meant to protect the city if the build falls through. He told the council his company is spending roughly $1 million to construct a new restaurant-compliant building on the site, and that he could contribute more if the city provided the structure itself. He has attributed the years of delay to permitting requirements across three state agencies, the OC Health Department, and multiple city departments.
What Fall 2026 Actually Buys
Assuming the timeline holds, here's what the finished project looks like according to city building documents. Huntington's on the Pier adds a 250 square foot kitchen to the old bait shop shell, plus two outdoor dining patios totaling 630 square feet and an expanded public restroom. The interior seats about 50, a climate-controlled patio adds 25 more, and a smaller space near the restrooms holds another 10. Bohr has described the concept as California coastal casual, with tacos, burgers, seafood, and a beer and wine license already secured.
The project's own site, huntingtonsotp.com, now lists a fall 2026 completion target, which lines up with Kennedy's push at the January meeting to see it open by the end of summer. Whether that holds is worth watching, given the track record, but it is the first specific date attached to this project in years.
Meanwhile, Downtown Already Solved Dinner
The useful thing to notice is that Huntington Beach did not wait around for 21 Main Street to figure itself out. The food scene kept moving on its own schedule.
Habit Burger opened its newest Southern California location at 8965 Atlanta Avenue on May 4, 2026, complete with the charburgers the chain built its name on out of Santa Barbara. Over at Bella Terra, Bacio di Latte opened its first Huntington Beach location in late July, setting up shop next to Philz Coffee. The NOW Massage is set to open its own space at 7777 Edinger Avenue in October, filling out that stretch of Bella Terra with something beyond food.
None of that required a pier restaurant to open. It happened in parallel, on its own timeline, while the marquee spot on the pier stayed exactly where it had been since 2021.
The Calendar Worth Actually Following This Month
If you have been tracking the pier restaurant as your main gauge of what's happening in town, you have been watching the wrong indicator. The calendar that actually runs on schedule looks like this:
- Surf City Nights closes three blocks of Main Street to traffic every Tuesday evening, with a certified farmers market and live music running roughly 4:30 to 8:30pm
- Old World Village's Bier Fest wrapped up its run on August 16, capping a week of German food and imported beer at the Village
- Surfin' Sundays returns to Pier Plaza on August 22 and 23, with the Surf City Marketplace open both days
- Old World Village's Oktoberfest picks up the slack starting September 6 and runs through November 8
- The Pacific Airshow follows along the coastline from October 2 through 4
That's a denser, more reliable rhythm than the pier restaurant has managed in half a decade, and it's the one that actually shapes a weekend here.
Why the Postcard Lags the City
The pier photo everyone uses to represent Huntington Beach hasn't updated itself in five years. The restaurant that photo implies should be there still isn't, and won't be until a bond, a permitting backlog, and a council that's openly skeptical of the timeline all resolve in the same direction.
Everything the postcard doesn't show moved forward without waiting for permission. A gelato shop opened. A burger chain built out a new location. A German beer festival ran its full course and closed on schedule, the way it does every August. The pier's empty stand isn't evidence that nothing changes here. It's evidence that one slow-moving deal can sit still while the rest of the city keeps its own calendar.
Next time someone mentions the restaurant that's supposed to open on the pier, you'll know which building they mean, why it's taken this long, and what's actually been filling the gap while it does.
Huntington Beach rewards the kind of attention that separates a stalled contract from a stalled neighborhood. If you're weighing a move here or just want a clearer read on how a specific block or building history plays out over time, Tim Hoard Real Estate can walk you through what's actually happening on the ground, not just what the photo suggests. Schedule a consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
