Chef Tim Hollingsworth will open a wood-fired American dining concept at OCVIBE, the $5 billion, 100-acre mixed-use district rising around Honda Center in Anaheim, California, with the restaurant slated to debut in late 2027. The signing expands OCVIBE's chef roster to include Hollingsworth alongside Roy Choi and José Andrés, positioning the district as one of the more ambitious independent foodservice builds in the Western U.S.

The Concept

Hollingsworth's yet-unnamed restaurant will anchor its menu around a wood-fired kitchen producing pizzas, meats, and seasonal vegetables over an open flame. A visible raw bar and pastry station will flank the main dining room — an interior design rooted in Southern California's mid-century residential aesthetic. The format is pitched as all-daypart-flexible: casual enough for weeknight covers, festive enough to absorb the pre- and post-show traffic generated by OCVIBE's adjacent 5,000-person concert hall.

Hollingsworth spent more than a decade at Thomas Keller's The French Laundry before building an independent culinary practice in Los Angeles. He received the James Beard Foundation's Rising Star Chef of the Year Award in 2010. His Orange County ties run personal as well as professional — he cited the OC-to-LA drive his guests have long made as motivation to plant a concept closer to that base.

Scale and F&B Context

Hollingsworth's unit will be one of five chef-driven signature restaurants at OCVIBE, complemented by Katella Commons, a 50,000-square-foot market hall housing 21 chef-driven kitchens and six bar and lounge concepts. In total, the district targets more than 35 distinct food and beverage experiences — a footprint that rivals the F&B programming of major sports-and-entertainment districts including Ponce City Market in Atlanta and The Battery at Truist Park. Chef Roy Choi's Best Friend and Osen Urban Table are already confirmed tenants; José Andrés will operate a restaurant inside OCVIBE's SENA hotel.

"From the beginning, our vision for OCVIBE has been to partner with chefs who tell authentic stories and create places where people genuinely want to gather," said Anthony Olheiser, Senior Vice President of Hospitality at OCVIBE. The operator-driven curation strategy — signing independent culinary talent rather than national chains — mirrors a broader entertainment-district trend in which landlords use chef anchors to drive dwell time and per-capita spend.

Phased Opening Timeline

OCVIBE's first phase begins welcoming guests in early 2027, led by the concert hall and Katella Commons market hall. Standalone restaurants, including Hollingsworth's, are scheduled to phase in during late 2027. Full district completion is targeted for 2033, at which point the development will encompass more than 2,000 residences, three entertainment venues, and 20 acres of open space — a scale that suggests sustained, multi-daypart foodservice volume rather than event-only traffic spikes.

For operators and food-and-beverage suppliers tracking venue-adjacent development, OCVIBE represents a meaningful demand node in one of Southern California's historically underserved dining markets. Orange County generates substantial dining traffic that has long exported to Los Angeles; a district of this F&B density could meaningfully redirect that spend locally. Coverage of similar mixed-use culinary buildouts has appeared in our restaurant-development and foodservice-trends verticals.

Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.