Orange County Restaurant Week has been running since 2008. Every March, restaurants from Laguna Beach to Fullerton put out prix-fixe menus, the county tourism machine lines up sponsors from Fashion Island to Irvine Spectrum, and diners bounce between cities with no reservation required, just a menu and an appetite. Anaheim Hills restaurants have shown up on those lists for years. Story Bar + Kitchen has had a spot on the countywide roster. But Anaheim Hills itself has never run one of its own.
That changes this September. The inaugural Anaheim Hills Restaurant Week runs September 12 through 19, with a kickoff mixer on September 10. It was put together by City Council Member Natalie Meeks, the print publication Anaheim Hills Neighbors Magazine, and the Anaheim Chamber of Commerce. Not the Orange County Restaurant Association. Not a tourism board. A council member and a neighborhood magazine decided the Hills needed something of its own, and eighteen years after the countywide version launched, they built it.
Why This Didn't Happen Sooner
The gap is worth sitting with for a second. Anaheim Hills has the restaurant density to support a week like this. Rosine's Mediterranean Grill has been serving the community since 1995, when it opened with six tables and grew into a family operation where son Hagop now runs a wine list that spans Napa to Lebanon. Story Bar + Kitchen opened more recently at the Anaheim Hills Festival shopping center on Santa Ana Canyon Road, where Executive Chef Christy Gray, a Le Cordon Bleu graduate who trained at the Michelin-starred Providence in Los Angeles before running her own catering company and cooking at Puesto and Benny & Mary's, built a menu that folds her mother's Filipino cooking into short rib, pork belly bao, and miso-glazed Chilean sea bass. Reunion Kitchen + Drink runs a tavern-meets-craft-kitchen concept a few blocks away, with truffle fries and a burger locals keep coming back for. Add Craft by Smoke and Fire, Bosscat and its whiskey room, Jincook, and Garlic High, and you have a stretch of Santa Ana Canyon Road that ranges from a three-decade-old Mediterranean institution to concepts that opened in the last two years, all within walking distance of each other.
That range is exactly what a restaurant week is supposed to showcase. So why did it take until 2026 to happen, and why did a council member organize it instead of the county association that already runs one every spring?
Part of the answer is who Natalie Meeks is. She's not an outside promoter parachuting in for a ribbon cutting. She's a longtime Anaheim Hills resident who raised her daughter there, volunteered at Oak Canyon Nature Center, and still takes part in the yearly Anaheim Hills 4th of July Celebration and concerts in the park. Before she was on the council, she spent nearly a decade as the city's Public Works director, overseeing a department with a budget north of $300 million and working on projects like the Anaheim Resort expansion and the ARTIC transit hub. That's a background built on infrastructure, not tourism marketing. When someone with that resume decides the neighborhood needs a restaurant week, it reads less like a promotional stunt and more like an extension of the same instinct that goes into funding a trail or a library branch: something residents will actually use, organized by someone who has to live with the outcome.
What This Says About the Neighborhood
OC Restaurant Week works because it's built for volume. It spans dozens of cities, hundreds of restaurants, and sponsors like Licor 43 and Casa Noble Tequila, and its whole value proposition is that you can hop from a Laguna Beach dinner to a Newport Beach lunch without planning much beyond a reservation. Anaheim Hills Restaurant Week is the opposite kind of bet. It's small on purpose. It's confined to one community, organized by people who live in it, promoted through a monthly print magazine that lands in mailboxes rather than a tourism website chasing statewide traffic.
That distinction matters if you live here. Anaheim Hills has spent years getting folded into the broader Anaheim story, which usually means the resort corridor, Disneyland, and the Packing District downtown. This restaurant week is a small but real signal that the neighborhood's dining scene has enough identity to stand on its own for a week instead of being one line item on a countywide spreadsheet every March. It's the same logic behind naming a nature center after decades of community volunteer hours or building a 4th of July celebration that outlasts whoever happens to be on the council. Small, repeated, locally run events are how a neighborhood tells you it thinks of itself as a place, not a suburb of somewhere else.
Making the Most of the Week
If you're planning to eat your way through it, a few practical notes. The kickoff mixer on September 10 is aimed at connecting participating restaurants with the community before the week itself starts, so it's worth watching the Anaheim Chamber of Commerce's event calendar for registration details as they firm up. Because this is a first-year event run outside the usual OC Restaurant Week infrastructure, don't assume the same no-ticket, walk-in-and-ask-for-the-menu format the countywide version uses. Anaheim Hills Neighbors Magazine and the Chamber are the two sources most likely to publish the final restaurant list and any reservation specifics as the week gets closer.
Worth building an itinerary around: Story Bar + Kitchen if you haven't tried Christy Gray's version of Filipino-inflected comfort food, Rosine's if you want a sense of what thirty years of consistency looks like on a plate, and Reunion Kitchen + Drink if you're after something more casual with a strong drink list. Craft by Smoke and Fire and Bosscat round out the week for anyone who wants a bigger, louder night out, and Jincook or Garlic High are worth a look if you haven't ventured into the newer wave of Asian concepts that have opened along the same corridor. All of it sits within a short drive of Oak Canyon Nature Center and the Anaheim Hills Golf Course, so a weekend that mixes a hike or a round of golf with dinner reservations isn't hard to put together.
A Neighborhood Worth Paying Attention To
None of this requires a real estate transaction to matter. A restaurant week organized by a council member and a neighborhood magazine, rather than a county tourism office, is a useful data point about how Anaheim Hills operates: locally, on its own timeline, with people who already live here deciding what the community needs. That's the kind of detail that doesn't show up on a listing sheet but shapes what it actually feels like to spend a Saturday here.
If you're already in the neighborhood, September 12 through 19 is a good excuse to try a restaurant you've been meaning to get to. And if you're the kind of person who pays attention to how a place organizes its own events, keep watching this one. It's a small week, but it says something about where Anaheim Hills sees itself heading.
For questions about this stretch of Santa Ana Canyon Road, the surrounding neighborhoods, or anything else Anaheim Hills related, Avedis Mossessian is always glad to talk shop about the community. Let's Connect.
