About Sapphire
Sapphire occupies one of Laguna Beach's most storied addresses: a historic 1929 cottage at 1200 South Coast Highway originally built as a pottery shack during Laguna's early arts-colony years, now restored into a handsome indoor-outdoor restaurant with a brick patio, climbing bougainvillea, and the kind of soft lighting that makes every table photograph well. Founded in 2007 by Iranian-born, Swiss-educated chef Azmin Ghahreman and reborn in 2020 as Sapphire, Cellar. Craft. Cook. under restaurateur Russ Bendel, it has become the sophisticated Laguna address that knows what it is: a serious restaurant with a serious cellar, aimed at diners who want their food to travel further than the menu on either side of them.
Ghahreman's original premise — globally inflected comfort food from a chef who actually trained across continents — is still visible in the current menu. A Mediterranean octopus starter arrives charred and tender. Tandoori-spiced chicken is among the best Indian-influenced dishes in Orange County. A clay-pot monkfish shows off the kitchen's range. Under the Cellar, Craft, Cook refresh, the menu has drifted toward New American and seafood with a coastal California sensibility, but the international curiosity remains in the margins — and the kitchen executes with the consistency of a house that has had fifteen years to refine its systems.
The cellar is the reason working sommeliers in the region keep the number in their phone. Over 2,000 labels on the pantry-retail side, a by-the-glass program that rotates with genuine intent, and a staff that will happily steer you off the obvious Napa cabernet and into a cellar-aged Gigondas that makes more sense with your table's order. The brick patio, softly lit and partially shaded, is the room to request. The indoor dining rooms, all original-pine-floored, are quieter and more conversational — better for a business dinner than an anniversary. Sapphire is the Laguna restaurant that impresses without announcing itself, which is often the correct move.
Best for Impressing Clients
Sapphire is purpose-built for the business dinner that needs to feel meaningful without sliding into a steakhouse-and-martini cliche. The cottage setting signals a host who has done their research; the wine list signals someone who takes food seriously; the globally inflected menu gives every dietary preference at the table a good answer; and the acoustics allow an actual conversation. Request the patio for a lighter tone, the back dining room for anything confidential. Expect the meal to close the deal, or at least earn you a second.