A new Mediterranean-style restaurant on Coronado’s Orange Avenue will open this month, nearly three years after plans for it were first unveiled.
The second-level dining venue comes from Black Swan Hospitality, the group behind Nolita Hall, an expansive, European-inspired dining and drinking venue in Little Italy.
Aptly named By the Sea — it’s about a thousand feet from the water — the 6,500-square-foot, indoor-outdoor restaurant occupies an upstairs space above the Tavern restaurant. It replaces the former Boardwalk Beach Club that was run by Coronado-based Blue Bridge Hospitality, but the restaurant closed just several months after opening in late 2019, not long before the pandemic struck. The venue never reopened.
The reinvention of the Orange Avenue location became an increasingly ambitious project as the husband-and-wife development team, Douglas and Lara Hamm, opted to take the structure down to its bare bones — a move that was necessary to transform the darkened interior into a light-filled space. It is due to open Aug. 12.
“When I first walked in and saw the space, I could see immediately it had a ton of potential, but it was a brutal design and layout, to be blunt,” said Douglas Hamm, co-founder of Black Swan Hospitality. “It was just really dark and it had a drop ceiling. There were separate rooms everywhere. So it had the potential to be something really special, but it needed to be completely reworked.
“We literally tore part of the roof off to make the ceiling higher in a section and, and we put in two huge skylights, and there are all new doors and windows that are probably allowing like two to three times more light than previously.”
Such a transformation proved costly. Hamm said the investment totaled $6 million.
By the Sea is inspired by the Hamms’ travels through the French Riviera, Greek Isles and the Amalfi Coast. Their hope was to imbue the new spot with the same sense of warmth and serenity they recall from their vacations abroad.
“I think it’s notable that we got married in Capri, Italy,” Hamm said. “So that’s a huge part of this — the inspiration of that coastal Mediterranean aspect that we’re kind of trying to bring to Coronado.”
The light-filled By the Sea dining room features natural stone surfaces and flooring. Its indoor and outdoor spaces seat more than 200 people. (Douglas Hamm)
The materials used for the restaurant’s interior design are intended to give it a natural feel — European cobblestone, flagstone and limestone, Hamm said. The walls are plastered, and there are custom wood tables. The interior features a lounge and skylit dining that open onto a eucalyptus-shaded outdoor patio.
The menu, which has a variety of starters, salads, vegetable dishes, pastas and main courses, has a strong Mediterranean influence, featuring such offerings as a mezze platter, linguine and clams, whole grilled branzino, and 28-day, dry-aged Flannery ribeye.
The restaurant’s debut comes at a time when the Coronado dining scene is more rapidly evolving, with more buzz-worthy venues coming online.
The Bower, a small boutique hotel just steps from the Hotel Del Coronado, opened more than a year ago and is notable for its rooftop bar and restaurant, Dive. Earlier this year, the Baby Grand hotel, also on Orange Avenue, opened. The CH Projects development includes an entirely outdoor Greek open-fire restaurant called Night Hawk, in addition to Fallen Empire, a hidden oyster and champagne bar.
While the nearby Hotel del Coronado has several dining venues, it raised its culinary profile with the debut last year of the global Japanese brand, Nobu.
“The reason we even decided to do this restaurant is because we moved to the island and as soon as we moved here in 2021, we realized that it was kind of a dining desert and none of this stuff you’re seeing now was open in 2021,” Hamm said. “So we saw a huge opportunity just to create something special and unique in an area where there was not a lot of that going on. Now I think there’s more of a reason to go to Coronado other than just going to the Del and leaving.”
The Hamms’ hospitality group is also the owner of the now shuttered Hob Nob Hill restaurant, which had been in business for more than 80 years. Black Swan purchased the restaurant real estate in early 2025 from previous long-time owner Tania Warchol, who had made no demand that the restaurant remain the same.
While it had been the Hamms’ intent to keep the restaurant operating with much the same menu, financial challenges mounted, making it difficult to sustain the operation, the hospitality group said in June. Hamm said that Black Swan is still weighing its options there, with the intent of bringing something new to the space, but the focus is now on getting By the Sea open.