Board & Brew serving up sandwiches in Laguna Beach

Los Angeles Times

2 days ago

Laguna Beach has a new eatery directly across from its window to the sea, as Board & Brew opened a store at the northwest corner of Coast Highway and Ocean Avenue.
The beach crowd and the locals alike had begun to get acquainted with the new sandwich shop by the early afternoon on Tuesday, the opening day for the business.
Board & Brew, which opened its first location in Del Mar in 1979, now has 33 locations, all but one of which is in Southern California.
The menu has largely stayed the same over the past couple of decades, said restaurant founder Tom Powers, who was on hand for the first day of operations at the new store. It began with originals such as the 'Turkado,' the 'Tub-O-Tuna,' the 'Vegi Supreme' and the 'Beef Dip.'
'It's like a baseball team,' Powers said. 'The good ones stay in the lineup. The other ones just kind of move on.'
Mike DeSanti, Bret Crutchfield and Joey Clark are co-owners of the Laguna Beach site, which has a prime location with a view of the Main Beach lifeguard tower.
'This exact location, I've been coming here since before it was Johnny Rockets,' DeSanti said. 'I would go in when it was the bookstore, and then Johnny Rockets came in, and we would eat here all the time. It was on my radar. About 15 years ago, I opened up a Board & Brew in San Clemente, and then I've always wanted to be in Laguna Beach.
'Wild Taco came into the space after Johnny Rockets, and then we were fortunate enough to get it after Wild Taco. … There's other spots in Laguna that we looked at that just didn't work. Parking is always difficult, but I think the trade-off here is just being on that hard corner, being across from the iconic lifeguard tower, being across from the beach really helped.'
Laguna Beach has long mulled ways to drive foot traffic toward its downtown businesses, chief among them the plan around a permanent pedestrian plaza on Forest Avenue.
City officials in February reacted to a survey in which a consultant found that retail vacancies in town had climbed from 3.7% in 2022 to 8.3% when the survey was conducted roughly a year ago.
At the time of that study session, City Manager Dave Kiff said the downtown area 'needs a lot of help,' noting disappointment in the empty storefronts.
The survey also revealed that rent had risen 12% to approximately $62 per square foot over the past three years.
'I have a menu that works, and we know that it works, and I'm going to be able to pay the rent with it,' DeSanti said. 'If I had to open up Mike's sandwich grotto with a whole new unproven menu, I don't think I would be able to take a flyer on paying the kind of rent that you do down here. While that gets you unique businesses in Laguna, that's, I think, why you see quite a bit of turnover with the mom-and-pop restaurant operations the last two years.'
With a container of a secret sauce sitting on the table during a joint interview, Powers was asked what the special ingredient is he looks for in a potential business partner. He quickly responded with one word: 'passion.'
DeSanti, who grew up in the San Diego area, said he was working in kitchens when he was in college.
'We just learned the kitchen lifestyle — working late nights and double shifts — while going to school,' DeSanti said. '[I] ended up working in banking, and I realized I didn't love banking, but I loved sandwiches. I connected with Tom over a mutual love of his food, and he signed us over a license deal to open up the first Board & Brew in Orange County.
'He licensed his name and his menu to us, and he would give me the secret recipes when we signed the deal. It was on a bar napkin. It was like a pinch of this, a dash of that, a handful of this.'
The recipe to make the rent in Laguna Beach? 'We're going to have to sell a lot of sandwiches,' DeSanti said, adding that the plan is to work toward building a base of repeat customers.
Board & Brew hours are 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, and from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Friday and Saturday.