The Pizza Shop That Ran Greenfield Drive for 35 Years Just Changed Hands. The Sign Still Says "Coming Soon."

If you've driven past 28051 Greenfield Drive lately, near where it feeds into La Paz Road, you've probably noticed the storefront in Suite B sitting dark. That address belonged to Slice of the Pie Pizza for thirty-five years, since 1991, the kind of tenure that turns a strip-mall pizza counter into a fixture people organize birthday parties and Friday nights around. As of this month, Yelp lists it as closed.

What's taking its place tells you something about this stretch of Laguna Niguel that a quick glance at the empty storefront won't. It isn't a national chain moving in on a well-worn lease. It's another family-run pizza operation, one with its own three decades of history a few exits down the coast.

Thirty-Five Years Under One Roof

Slice of the Pie built its identity on New York style pizza by the slice, garlic knots, calzones, and hand-stretched dough, the kind of menu that reads the same in 2026 as it would have in 1991. For a strip center that has otherwise turned over tenants regularly, that kind of stability is unusual. Most businesses in a shopping plaza don't last three and a half decades. This one did, long enough to become the default answer when someone asked where to get a slice near La Paz Road.

Its closure doesn't appear to be part of a larger pattern of vacancy on that block. The rest of the row is intact. What changed is specific to Suite B.

The Family Taking Over the Lease

The new tenant is Gina's Pizza, and its arrival in Laguna Niguel is less a chain expansion story and more a second family legacy moving into the space the first one left behind. Gina's traces back to 1975, when Gina Costa, who had immigrated from Palermo, Sicily, in the 1950s, opened her first restaurant in Corona Del Mar. The brand now operates locations in Corona Del Mar, Laguna Beach, and Costa Mesa, with Laguna Niguel set to become its fourth. It's run today by third-generation owners Kerry McMahan and Anna Costa, who are bringing the same Sicilian-rooted menu, hand-tossed pizzas, house-made sauces, and dishes like the Chicken Palermo Alfredo, north into Orange County's newest location for the brand.

On its own site, the company frames the move less like a real estate transaction and more like a homecoming it's been waiting to make. "Laguna Niguel has been on our minds for a long time," the company wrote in its announcement for the new location. That's a small detail, but it matters if you're trying to understand what's happening on this block. This isn't a landlord filling a vacancy with whatever chain bid highest. It's a fifty-year-old Orange County pizza family choosing this specific address on purpose.

Why the Sign Still Says "Opening Soon"

Here's the part that will matter if you've been checking that window every few weeks. Gina's own location page for Laguna Niguel targeted a spring 2026 opening. Spring has come and gone, and as of the most recent information available, the storefront listing was still marked "opening soon," with no confirmed open date attached.

That gap isn't unusual for a restaurant changeover, even a well-funded one. The move became public in the first place through a liquor license filing tied to the property, the kind of paperwork that typically means a business is deep in the permitting and licensing phase rather than final buildout. Kitchen retrofits, health department sign-off, and license transfers routinely push a projected opening date back by months, regardless of how ready the dining room looks from the sidewalk. If you've been wondering why the lights are on but the doors aren't open, that's most likely why.

The Rest of the Row Hasn't Moved

Part of what makes this turnover easy to track is that everything around Suite B has stayed put. The same stretch still includes:

• Jersey Mike's Subs
• Thai Bite Thai Cuisine
• Earth Bowl Superfoods
• Romeo Cucina, an Italian spot with its own pizza and wine bar
• WR Kitchen & Bar, the Wood Ranch concept
• Bricks & Minifigs, the LEGO and collectibles shop a couple of doors down

That last one is worth a mention if you've got kids. Slice of the Pie's old online reviews mention families picking up pizza for parties happening right there at Bricks & Minifigs, a small sign of how tightly these few storefronts function as a single errand run rather than separate destinations.

What This Turnover Actually Says About the Neighborhood

Here's the detail that's easy to miss if you only register "restaurant closes, restaurant opens." Romeo Cucina, an Italian restaurant with its own pizza and wine bar, sits in the same row Gina's is moving into. That means this particular corner of Laguna Niguel is about to support two family-style Italian and pizza concepts within a few doors of each other, not because a developer engineered it that way, but because independent operators keep choosing this same short stretch of Greenfield Drive on their own.

That's not the story you'd expect if your baseline assumption is that neighborhood plazas slowly get chained out, one Sweetgreen or fast-casual concept at a time. Some of that has happened elsewhere in Laguna Niguel this year. But on this specific block, the pattern running the other direction, toward family-owned Italian food with decades of history somewhere on the resume, has held for thirty-five straight years and, if Gina's timeline holds, is about to continue for a good while longer.

For residents who've lived near this corner for years, that continuity is probably more relevant than any single restaurant's menu. It's a small, concrete signal about the kind of businesses this part of the city can actually support long-term, family operations with real roots rather than concepts testing the market.

If you're the type who tracks these small shifts, watch for the "opening soon" sign to come down. Given how the licensing timeline typically runs, expect it sometime in the coming months rather than any day now.

Laguna Niguel's character shows up in details like this one, the plazas that hold onto family businesses for decades even as the tenants themselves change. If you're thinking about a move to this part of the city, or you already live here and want a read on how a specific street or neighborhood tends to hold its value and its character over time, Judy Parsons pays attention to exactly this kind of detail. Book a complimentary home strategy session to talk through what she's watching in your corner of South Orange County.