Old Towne Orange has nearly 50 restaurants. How did it become a dining destination? (2024)

A block away from Orange City Hall, a rusty old store sign hangs askew near the top of a two-story building. Big reddish metallic letters spell out “CAMP’S HARDWARE.”

Well, almost. The “A” in hardware is missing.

For decades, the sign was hidden, forgotten even, under a layer of plaster after newer store owners posted their insignias.

You see, Camp’s Hardware went out of business around 75 years ago, and for many years since Bob’s Shade & Linoleum occupied the building at 208 E. Chapman Ave., in Old Towne Orange.

But just a few weeks back, Enrico Pozzuoli rediscovered the sign while preparing the old storefront for yet another transition as the building becomes his incoming Italian restaurant, Centro — like the one in Tustin.

“It was a complete surprise,” Pozzuoli said. Even for him. And he knows quite a bit about the building’s history.

He’s spent months renovating the circa 1905 structure, which served as a cow pen and butcher shop before it became a hardware store. After a brief stint as a thrift shop, Pozzuoli is turning the venue into a multistory restaurant with a basem*nt dining room and wine cellar.

Since 1905, that building on Chapman Avenue has practically been everything. And it’s practically seen everything, too, as Old Towne has evolved from a downtown in demise to an eclectic antiquing district to what it’s becoming today — a modern dining destination.

When Pozzuoli opens Centro in a couple of months, Old Towne Orange will have approximately 50 restaurants. Realtor Al Ricci, who owns the property of about half of them, says the market is far from saturated.

“It doesn’t matter how many restaurants there are,” he said.”There’s enough love to go around as long as you’re unique.”

And, a quick glance around the Orange Circle at Glassell Street and Chapman suggests that he’s probably right. On any given night, downtown is packed with people. The restaurants are bristling with diners. And, Orange is attracting a refreshing diversity of options for a small town. Its newest venues to open include a chai tea bar, a Middle Eastern ice cream shop and a dumpling house.

The area has become an economic engine for a city otherwise struggling to have its sales tax revenue keep up with expenses. Aaron Schulze, Orange’s economic development manager, said downtown businesses generated more than $1.1 million dollars in sales tax for the city last year — a critical number considering Orange’s budget woes.

“Without a doubt, this is the best balance of businesses Old Towne has ever had,” said Orange Chamber of Commerce President Elizabeth Holloman.

Life in Old Towne wasn’t always so vibrant.

“It used to be that you could fire a cannon down Glassell Street at 6 p.m. and not hit anyone,” Ricci said.

In the 1970s, downtown Orange was a conventional post-war commercial district anchored by Sears and an Alpha Beta grocery store.

“People would come to Old Towne to go grocery shopping and go to Sears,” Schulze said. “They’d come here to get their essentials.”

Then came the malls: MainPlace, the Block (now the Outlets at Orange) and the Village at Orange, where Sears moved. Retail went elsewhere. Downtown went quiet. “You wouldn’t come downtown anymore to shop,” Holloman said. “That kind of brought this area down. It was depressed, even blighted.”

“When the malls opened, that’s when the antique stores came in,” Schulze said.

Ricci, who started dealing in Orange in the 1970s, explained that Old Towne property owners at that time, succumbing to the decline of the commercial area, began to offer low-cost, 30-year leases to prospective business operators. That opened the floodgates for antique shops.

By the 1990s, Old Towne had become a sleepy antiquing district.

“All of the businesses closed early because of a lack of demand,” Schulze said. “Presumably, the customers for antique shops are not night owls.”

In 1998, downtown shop owners tried to change the area’s image with a public relations campaign called “Hot Summer Nights.” In a press release, businesses announced they would stay open later on Friday evenings. It’s just that only nine businesses officially participated and most of them were antique galleries and tea houses.

When the low-cost, long-term leases began to expire in the early 2000s, a restaurant renaissance began.

Ricci and a handful of other developers lured risk-tolerant restaurant operators to take a chance on the fledgling market, pitching a vision of Old Towne as a dining destination.

One significant hurdle stood in their way — the cost. Ricci said it can take twice as much money to open a restaurant in Old Towne compared to similar markets in Orange County because the old buildings never designed for modern kitchens have to be retrofitted and there’s red tape around historic designations.

At first, Ricci’s vision was hard to see, said Ed Patrick, who along with his wife, Gabbi, became one of the first new-wave Orange restaurant owners. They opened Gabbi’s Mexican Kitchen on Glassell Street in 2005.

When the couple drove to Orange to scout potential restaurant locations, Gabbi Patrick felt unimpressed by what Ricci had to show them.

“Al had bought this building from a couple that owned an antique store there, and it was just jampacked with antiques and it was old and terrible,” Ed Patrick said. “I went and showed Gabbi, and she said, ‘This is a piece of crap.’”

Only, he and Ricci convinced her it wasn’t. And for the last 20 years, it’s been the home of their ever-popular restaurant.

Behind the antiques, under a layer of unsightly green carpet glued to the floor and above a plain stucco false ceiling, Patrick and Ricci saw the original red brick walls and wooden truss ceiling of the circa 1900 structure. Patrick stripped away the rest, and to this day the red brick and wood motif sets the aura of their voguish dining room.

Another hurdle for restaurant operators in Orange has always been parking.

Before the restaurant renaissance, restaurant operators used to have to meet stringent off-street parking requirements or pay a fee in lieu of offering parking. Ricci said the fee, coupled with the already-high costs of opening a restaurant in historic Old Towne, made restaurant development nearly cost-prohibitive for most business owners.

He lobbied the city to remove the in-lieu parking fee, which it eventually did, leading to what Ricci says was the turning point in Old Towne’s destiny.

“We had to change the parking code, and we did,” Ricci said. “That was the metamorphosis from antique stores to what Old Towne is today. We’ve become a restaurant destination. Talk about the city needing money, restaurants bring in a lot of sales tax.”

In 2019, the city completed a multilevel parking garage with 600 spaces on the west end of downtown, spurring another wave of restaurants opening on that side of the circle, Schulze said.

In came The Taco Stand, Ojai Burger, Snooze, Bosscat Kitchen, Finney’s Crafthouse … the list goes on with even more coffee shops west of Glassell.

Even with the parking garage, some restaurant owners and city officials still see limited parking as a big issue in downtown. The City Council is in the early stages of exploring the idea of making people pay for parking in the area. It is also considering whether to convert a decrepit former firehouse into another parking lot.

To this day, more than a handful of antique stores thrive in Old Towne, surrounded by stylish restaurants. Those that remain tend to focus on higher-end vintage goods.

“We’ve stayed in business over 30 years because of the quality of our dealers,” said Country Roads Antiques co-owner Bryce Jackson. But even his store is half the size it used to be, ceding space to accommodate Finney’s.

“We had to consolidate and that was tough, but Finney’s and the other restaurants do bring in customers who wouldn’t otherwise come antiquing,” Jackson said.

The mix of shopping and dining has Old Towne back in style.

“Old Towne went out of vogue, and now it’s back in,” Holloman said. “In some ways, we look at Old Towne as a really cool outdoor mall. That’s what people want — an outdoor feel with experiences.”

But with style comes price increases. The surge in downtown Orange commercial real estate prices has pinched some longstanding restaurants. Watson’s Diner, which opened in 1899, closed in 2022, replaced by Hectors, a chic Mexican restaurant and bar.

Felix Continental Cafe, which opened its doors in 1979, recently closed, its owners saying on Facebook “the ongoing market volatility and economic circ*mstances” were forcing the closure.

Over the years, some residents have lamented the loss of unique Orange institutions while watching chains encroach on the traffic circle at the heart of Old Towne. For a while, two Starbucks straddled either side of the plaza. Now, there’s an Urth Caffe at one corner and a Blaze Pizza across the street.

“The city doesn’t control whether a land owner chooses to lease to a chain,” Schulze noted.

But Old Towne has also attracted an array of unique dining options such as O Sea, an award-winning seafood restaurant that opened in 2021. “We came to Orange because this is a very unique community in Orange County,” said O Sea owner Mike Flynn. “You’re not going to find anything else like this in the county.”

Even many of the chains now in Old Towne — like Bosscat and Finney’s — feel unique because they have incorporated historic Orange elements into their designs. Bosscat, for instance, built unique outdoor dining around old Mobil gas pumps outside of what used to be Rod’s Liquor. A large neon Rod’s Liquor sign still adorns the restaurant’s facade. Finney’s, meanwhile, pays homage with historic photos of Old Towne dating back to 1907.

In many ways, the character of the businesses of Old Towne Orange has evolved hand-in-hand with the community around it. Once an affordable place to live, the median Old Towne home currently sells for close to $1.4 million. That’s higher than the average home value across Orange County.

And, considering many of its cottage homes are smaller than the average Orange County house, the price per square foot of residential real estate in Old Towne is more than 20% higher than the average around the county, according to Redfin, a real estate brokerage site.

Meanwhile, another Old Towne resident, Chapman University has grown up, too. Whereas fall enrollment hovered around 4,000 students in the mid-1990s, now, it’s around 10,000 students. Their tastes and study habits are probably the biggest reasons why a dozen coffee shops abound within one block of the circle.

One of those Chapman University students even drew a restaurant to Old Towne. When Brad Finefrock, co-owner of Finney’s Crafthouse, dropped his daughter off at school a few years back, he instantly fell in love with the area and decided to make it home to his next restaurant.

“I never knew Old Towne existed until my daughter went to school at Chapman,” the Santa Barbara resident said. “What a wonderful little town and community.”

Working with Ricci, he moved his restaurant into what had been a Dodge Brothers dealership in the early 1900s and later an automotive garage.

“The building still has the original walls and big wooden truss ceilings, and it feels like an old factory, which is basically what it was,” Finefrock said. “What a fabulous historic building of 100 years that we were excited to apply an adaptive reuse into a modern casual dining gastropub. It really fit within our design criteria because we’re kind of a 1920s prohibition-era style design and motif.”

For all the design benefits of adaptive reuse, restaurant owners complain of challenges, too. For instance, the city’s planning department denied Finney’s application to have open windows on Chapman Avenue because that would have ostensibly contradicted the building’s historic design.

Blocks away, Pozzuolli has paid a planning consultant thousands of dollars to help him assess what he can do with the Camp’s Hardware sign without violating construction regulations designed for historic preservation.

“We might just leave the sign up,” he said.

Ultimately, these little hiccups have not prevented a barrage of restaurants from opening in Old Towne. Conversely, the historic preservation is what has drawn so many restaurants.

“Other cities tore down their historic downtowns,” Ricci said. “Orange kept theirs.”

He compares the downtown to beachfront property.

“It costs double to build in Old Towne compared to many places, but it’s worth it,” he said. “Old Towne properties are great investments because they’re not making any more old towns.”

Originally Published: September 3, 2024 at 9:14 a.m.