Which door are you walking toward tonight?
For years, anyone in Point Del Mar craving Bamboo Bistro's chicken lettuce wraps or a bowl of bun ca made the same short trip down to 5th Avenue and turned into the same corner suite at 2600 East Coast Highway. That single door handled everything: the quick to-go order before a Tuesday soccer practice, the anniversary dinner, the Sunday brunch table for six. This year, a permit filed with the City of Newport Beach quietly ended that arrangement. The restaurant expanded into the suite next door, and the two spaces now do different jobs. Understanding which door does what is the small, useful thing longtime neighbors haven't fully caught up on yet.
The split, according to the paperwork
The planning document behind the project is specific in a way that matters if you're the one walking down there hungry. It describes an expansion into the adjacent suite, a remodel of the original space to operate as "take-out limited" with six seats, and a newly available dine-in room next door with a 20-seat maximum. In plain terms: the corner you've ordered from for years is now built for speed, not for sitting down, and the tables you remember have moved a few feet over.
Proprietor Chau Haller, a licensed dietitian who built the menu around her mother Diane Dang's recipes from the well-known Brodard restaurants, has run Bamboo Bistro long enough that regulars treat it as a fixed point on the map. The Corona del Mar Chamber of Commerce marked the finished remodel with a grand-opening reception, the kind of small civic ritual that tells you a project actually closed rather than dragging on indefinitely. Reviewers writing in this year have started noting "the new addition," which is about as close as Yelp gets to confirming a permit filing.
The practical upshot for Point Del Mar: if you're grabbing dinner solo or picking up an order between errands, the original suite still works exactly as it always did. If you're bringing four people and want a table, you now walk to the door next to it. Two different trips, one address.
That same remodeled block at 2600 East Coast Highway has also picked up new neighbors. Chamber event listings for the building's grand opening reference a shared parking structure serving Bamboo Bistro alongside The NOW Massage and a Sugarfish location, the sushi concept that opened its first shop in Marina del Rey back in 2008. None of this changes the walk distance from Point Del Mar. It does mean the five minutes you spend getting there now end at a slightly busier corner than the one you grew up walking past.
What the walk looks like once you keep going
Bamboo Bistro is the first stop, not the only one. Point Del Mar sits close enough to string together a loop that most residents do in fragments rather than all at once:
- Down to 5th Avenue for the restaurant corner at 2600 East Coast Highway
- East along 5th to Grant Howald Park, between Marguerite and Goldenrod
- Up through the valley trail to Jasmine View Park at Harbor View Drive and Marguerite
- Past Harbor View Elementary, which sits adjacent to both parks
Grant Howald Park has served the neighborhood since 1954, and the version you're walking through today is the result of a $6.3 million renovation completed in 2021. The improvements swapped the old grass field for water-saving synthetic turf, which the city estimated would save about two million gallons of irrigation water a year, and added new play structures, resurfaced parking, and a rebuilt restroom building alongside the existing tennis and basketball courts. The Community Youth Center next to the field dates to 1998 and was itself renovated in 2008, so the park has been in a near-constant state of small upgrades for most of the last two decades.
The connector most people miss is the trail out of Jasmine View Park. It isn't the park itself that matters so much as the path leading south from it, which winds down through a landscaped valley to Grant Howald Park and stays lit after dark. That single detail turns the loop from a daytime errand into something you can do after dinner, which is worth knowing if you've only ever walked it at noon.
The corner's other calendar
The same stretch of Coast Highway that houses Bamboo Bistro also anchors two of the Chamber's biggest annual events, and they bookend the year in a way that's easy to miss if you're only thinking about dinner.
| Event | Organized by | What happens near you |
|---|---|---|
| CdM Scenic 5K & Fun Walk | Corona del Mar Chamber of Commerce | Runs each June, starting on the bluffs above Corona del Mar State Beach, with a Restaurant Row where local eateries hand out roughly 1,300 tastings on race morning |
| CdM Christmas Walk | Corona del Mar Chamber of Commerce | Lights the Coast Highway village each December, drawing volunteers and foot traffic through the same corridor Point Del Mar residents already use to reach Bamboo Bistro |
The 2026 Scenic 5K ran its 45th edition on June 6, already behind us for the year, with the Chamber marking calendars for June 5, 2027. The Christmas Walk is the next civic marker on the block, and it uses the same sidewalks you'd already be on for a dinner run, just with more people on them and string lights overhead.
Why the split matters more than it sounds like it should
None of this changes property values or school boundaries. It changes something smaller and more immediate: the calculation Point Del Mar residents make every time they decide whether tonight is a walk-and-grab night or a walk-and-sit night. Before the remodel, that decision didn't exist, because there was only one door and one set of tables. Now the answer to "should we just walk down" depends on whether you're feeding two people or six, and whether you want a seat or a bag.
It's a minor piece of neighborhood literacy, the kind that separates someone who's lived two blocks from 5th Avenue for a decade from someone who moved in last spring. The takeout counter you remember is still there. It just isn't where you sit anymore.
If you're weighing a move within Point Del Mar, or you're already here and curious what the market looks like for a home on this stretch of walkable Corona del Mar, the Jacqueline Thompson Group tracks this pocket closely enough to know which door you'll end up walking toward. Reach out for a confidential conversation about the neighborhood or a private valuation when the time is right.
