Second Street's Rarest Kind of Change Just Landed in Belmont Shore
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
Storefronts on Second Street turn over all the time. A boutique becomes a poke shop, a salon swaps signage, a café gets a new espresso machine and a new name within the same lease. That kind of churn is so routine in Belmont Shore that most residents stop noticing it. What almost never happens on this strip is a full-building replacement of a restaurant that had been there for decades. That's exactly what happened at 5620 2nd Street this summer, and it's worth understanding why this particular change is different from the dozens of smaller ones that came before it.
For years, the two-story building at 5620 2nd Street housed Michael's on Naples, a longtime Italian restaurant that had become part of the neighborhood's fixed geography. In late 2025, Los Angeles-based Bacari Restaurants acquired the building in a deal brokered by JLL on the seller's side and Cushman & Wakefield on the buyer's, for an undisclosed amount, with plans to gut and rebuild the interior entirely. The restaurant opened to the public on June 1, 2026, following a friends-and-family preview.
What makes this a different kind of event than the usual Second Street reshuffle is the scale of the redo. Bacari, founded in 2008 by brothers Danny and Robert Kronfli alongside Chef Lior Hillel, whose background includes time in the three-Michelin-starred Jean-Georges kitchen, didn't just repaint and rehang a sign. The Long Beach location was rebuilt with rich wood flooring, exposed timber beams, textured plaster walls, arched masonry details, and vintage-style chandeliers, aiming for an old-world Mediterranean feel layered with European brasserie touches. About the only physical link to the building's previous life is the marble bartop, which was kept and now sits on the rooftop level.
This is Bacari's first Long Beach location and its ninth or tenth overall, joining existing spots in Silver Lake, West 3rd Street, Playa del Rey, Glendale, West Adams, Sherman Oaks, Beverly Hills, and Culver City. For a strip where most restaurant turnover looks like a new operator taking over an existing storefront with a light refresh, an outside group buying a two-story anchor building and running a months-long redesign is a genuinely uncommon event.
Belmont Shore's business district runs roughly 14 blocks along Second Street, and the Belmont Shore Business Association's own count puts the number of dining establishments at more than 50, ranging from fine dining to takeout, with more restaurant patios than anywhere else in the city. That density is exactly why a single legacy address changing ownership carries more weight here than it would somewhere with less turnover pressure already baked in. In a corridor built on constant, low-stakes swapping of small storefronts, a full-building replacement of a decades-old anchor tenant is the kind of change residents will still be talking about at the end of summer, not the kind that gets absorbed into the background within a week.
If you've been putting off a reservation to see whether Bacari earns a permanent spot in your rotation, Belmont Shore's own event calendar has already done some of that work for you. Stroll & Savor, the Belmont Shore Business Association's signature summer series, runs monthly from May through August, and residents buy a book of tickets that can be redeemed for small samples at participating restaurants and shops up and down the strip. It's built specifically for the kind of low-commitment tasting that answers the "is it worth a Friday night" question before you actually book one.
The confirmed 2026 dates are:
That last date, August 19 and 20, is the final Stroll & Savor of the season. With today sitting at August 8, that leaves just under two weeks before the summer series wraps for the year, which is a fairly narrow window if you've been meaning to use one of these evenings to get a read on the new build without committing to a full dinner.
The practical shift for anyone who treats Second Street as their regular rotation is mostly about timing. Bacari's posted hours run Monday through Thursday from 4:30 in the afternoon, Friday from 4:30 p.m. to midnight, and Saturday with a brunch seating from 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. before switching to dinner service from 4 p.m. to midnight. That late Friday and Saturday close adds a genuine late-evening seating option to a strip that's historically been better known for early dinners and long alfresco stretches than for anything approaching a midnight table.
That alfresco identity hasn't gone anywhere. Belmont Shore is still the part of Long Beach where you can eat outside comfortably in January, and the sheer density of restaurant patios along Second Street remains one of the defining textures of living here. What's changed is that the strip now has one more anchor-scale option layered into that mix, one built around a full sit-down experience across two floors rather than a quick counter order.
None of this means Second Street suddenly feels different block by block. Most of the storefronts you recognize are still exactly where you left them. But the story of this particular summer isn't really about a new restaurant opening, plenty of those happen every year. It's about how rarely a change of this scale happens on a corridor built for small, constant turnover, and about the fact that the neighborhood's own event calendar happens to give residents an easy, ticketed way to test it out before the rest of the city catches on. If you're weighing whether to use the last Stroll & Savor weekend of the year to see what a two-story rebuild of a decades-old Belmont Shore address actually feels like in person, August 19 and 20 is your last chance this season.
For those thinking further ahead, about buying or selling near a corridor that just absorbed its rarest kind of change in years, that's a conversation worth having with someone who tracks these shifts as they happen, not after the fact. Nick Lombardo works Long Beach and the surrounding coastal markets closely enough to know when a single address changing hands is worth paying attention to. Let's Connect.
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