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Life's a Surreality Show in Laguna Beach

Michael Martin

Located 40 miles southwest of Los Angeles, Orange County's Laguna Beach has become a symbol of glitzy Southern California living where blond 19-year-olds drive Mercedes convertibles and life revolves around gossipy lunches and late-night parties at the beach.

To get there, you travel through less glamorous beach enclaves like Long Beach and Huntington Beach before a perfectly paved toll road speeds through a hillside Emerald City of affluent planned communities before spitting out on to a two-lane canyon road that ends in one of America's most-famous beach towns.

The beach-side Montage Resort is widely regarded as one of Southern California's greatest hotels.

Your Laguna Beach home: Downtown Laguna Beach is a five- or six-block square of shaded shopping streets with a mix of old-time drugstores, sexy surf shops and one-room eateries with lively street-front terraces. Walking distance to town and directly on the beach, The Surf & Sand Resort has been a long-time hotel fixture for posh-L.A. weekenders looking for an oceanfront home. A perfectly cast ensemble of valets welcomes guests with a surfer-dude casual "welcome to the Surf & Sand."

The Surf & Sand is composed of an oceanfront mid-rise building with pool deck and adjacent bungalow-style annex offering one of the only true whitewater hotel experiences in the O.C. Guest rooms were recently updated to a beachy California design of cushy striped furnishings, glossy white wood shutters and the occasional fireplace. The best parts of the hotel are the oversize balconies, best in Surfside rooms, that allow the waves to crash within 30 feet of your bed while serenading you through your sleep, starting at $335 a night.

Need something fancier? While technically also on the ocean, nearby Montage Resort offers a sprawling California Craftsman-style resort located on a seafront bluff just south of the downtown village. A dramatic tumbled stone entryway leads to a glamorous lobby lounge with views of the rectangular resort pool and Pacific Ocean while you sip margaritas and martinis. Widely regarded as one of Southern California's greatest resorts, rooms are posh but conservative with oversize lounge areas, marble bathrooms and furnished terraces. Rates are high, upwards of $695 on weekends.

Laguna Beach by day: If you've done your due diligence of watching shows like "Laguna Beach" or "The Real Housewives of Orange County," you'll realize that most locals don't work 9-to-5. Days starts around 10 a.m. as locals come straight from their Equinox or Sports Club LA workouts to hit beach boutiques.

Showing off the fashion fruits of their morning buying binge, locals scout out their favorite swatches of sand. North and South Laguna is separated by Victoria Beach, one of the city's quieter residential beaches where locals do their "Baywatch" runs from their beachfront cottages along a pristine stretch of white sand. Those looking for more action hit nearby Salt Creek Beach to the south or Main Beach near downtown, which offer MTV-style social scenes that involve afternoon volleyball and suntan frolicking in the chilly Pacific waters.

After the beach, locals head back to town for a light lunch and a bit more shopping. Anastasia offers a bit of both with a designer emporium carrying brands like Y-3 and Maison Margiela as well as offering a sleek eatery for French-Californian lunches of supermodel salads, rich pastas and sandwiches accompanied by bottles of pinot or Pommery. The crowd is one of the chicest you'll find in any O.C. fashion boutique, luring those well-known starlets of MTV reality shows and resident actresses looking to land their Saturday night outfits.

The real Laguna after dark: Like most resort towns, there's a clear line between tourists and locals when it comes to the city's dining scene. Nowhere is this divide more evident than Las Brisas Mexican Restaurant, an uber-popular Mexican restaurant perched atop Main Beach with a stunning panorama of the Pacific most often viewed with a "say cheese" through a digital camera lens. But rather than enduring the reservation-only dining room and its table-for-eight bus groups, make like a local and hit the terrace bar with its happy hour scene of margaritas, Ceviche and Baja fish tacos.

While dining rooms at places like the Montage Resort and nearby St. Regis in Dana Point garner national magazine features and accolades, it's restaurants like Ristorante Rumari that lure high-heeled locals from their hillside homes for casual family-style meals in this eclectic village dining room. The cozy dining space manages a formal vibe despite its casual décor and hip clientele. Rumari is owned by the Crivello family, who have been serving classic Piedmont cuisine with a menu of homemade gnocchi porcini, seafood dishes and veal specialties for more than 15 years.

Those looking for more scene and less cozy hit Mosun, one of Laguna's hottest sushi bars, offering a super-trendy dining room full of well-pressed dress shirts and strategically exposed cleavage in Cavalli dresses. The restaurant attracts Laguna's hottest singles and party-minded couples for be-seen sushi dinners with an extensive sake list and nightly entertainment. Afterward, the action moves upstairs to Club M with its late-night dance parties with DJs spinning electronic house and hip-hop anthems like "Single Ladies" and "Disturbia" till 2 a.m.