Walk Marine Avenue this fall and there's a stretch past Onano and the ferry landing where the sidewalk narrows around a plywood fence taller than anything else on the block. Scaffolding rises above the roofline of the shops on either side. Whatever's behind that fence isn't a paint job or a kitchen remodel. It's a building going up where a much smaller one used to stand, and on a street where almost nothing gets rebuilt from the ground up, that's the part worth understanding before the reservations start.
The address is 224 Marine Avenue, and what's coming is Arc Balboa Island, a new restaurant from Chef Noah von Blöm and Marín Howarth von Blöm. Their names are already familiar to anyone who's eaten at Arc Butcher & Baker in Cannery Village, a few minutes away on the Balboa Peninsula, or at Arc Food & Libations in Costa Mesa. This is their third room, and it's the one taking the longest to get to a table.
A 1936 Building Comes Down for a Two-Story One
The lot at 224 Marine Avenue is 2,250 square feet, which is small even by Balboa Island standards. The building that's coming down was constructed in 1936, and city planning records describe it as no longer accessible under current code. In its place, the von Blöms are putting up a 484-square-foot outdoor-only patio at the street, with no indoor seating at all, backed by a 1,102-square-foot two-story structure at the rear of the lot. In the project's own description filed with the city, the intent was to design something that would "resemble a nostalgic Balboa Island front porch," a patio wrapped in tall planters and trees for privacy rather than a dining room with four walls.
That combination, a street-facing porch with a taller structure stacked behind it, is not how most of Marine Avenue works. The commercial buildings along this stretch are almost all single-story storefronts that inherited their footprint from whoever built there decades ago. A new two-story structure means someone decided the numbers justified building up on a lot too small to build out, and that the outdoor-only, garden-style concept was worth the added construction rather than just leasing an existing shell.
Why There's No Parking Lot
One detail in the city filing explains why the design leans so heavily on outdoor space instead of expanding the footprint. On a 2,250-square-foot lot, on-site parking is not feasible. The application lists zero standard stalls and zero accessible van stalls. That's not unusual for Marine Avenue commercial space generally, where most tenants have always operated without dedicated lots, but it does mean Arc is opening with the same constraint every other Marine Avenue business already lives with rather than trying to solve it with new construction. The trade-off shows up in the hours instead: the filing lists 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. operations, wide enough to cover morning coffee traffic through a full dinner service rather than a single evening rush that would compete hardest for street parking.
Five Years From Filing to Fence
The city project description for 224 Marine Avenue is dated November 2021. The liquor license application that signaled the project was actually moving forward came in early 2026, and by August, multiple local reports still described the site as under construction with completion targeted for the end of 2026. That's roughly five years between the initial filing and a fence going up, on a lot smaller than most single-family driveways.
That timeline matters for how to read the construction now. This wasn't a lease signed last spring and a kitchen buildout finished by summer. It's a project that moved through Newport Beach's planning process for years before anyone broke ground, which tracks with how differently the city treats a compact-lot, two-story build on Balboa Island compared to a straightforward tenant swap.
The Rest of Marine Avenue Moved Faster
Two other changes landed on Marine Avenue this year, and both moved at a much more ordinary pace.
- Jasper Coffee opened in soft-launch phase on Marine Avenue, the first new coffee tenant the street has picked up in a long stretch of years where the same handful of shops held their spots.
- A Luke's Lobster shack opened nearby, serving lobster, crab, and shrimp rolls alongside New England clam chowder and Cape Cod potato chips, a straightforward tenant fit into an existing space.
Both are described by people tracking the corridor as ordinary turnover, the kind Marine Avenue absorbs every few years without changing its shape. Arc is the outlier. More than one account of this year's changes on the island singles it out as the bigger commitment precisely because it's altering the building itself, not just what's served inside it.
What Opens, and When
Arc Balboa Island is planned as a full-service restaurant built around approachable New American food, farm-to-table ingredients, and a curated beer and wine program, served entirely on that garden patio. If the timeline holds, construction wraps by the end of 2026, which puts an opening somewhere in the window after that, pending final inspections and the last steps of the liquor license process.
For anyone who's watched the fence go up without knowing what it was for, the short version is this: a respected local restaurant group bought into the idea that a bigger structure was worth building on one of the smallest lots on the block, and the city took its time confirming that made sense. What lands at street level in a few months will be the porch. What actually changed is what's standing behind it.
If you've been watching this stretch of Marine Avenue and you're curious about how changes like this tend to ripple through the rest of the island's commercial blocks, Mason | Taylor Associates keeps a close eye on what's shifting here, one address at a time.
