Plans for a café at Costa Mesa’s Lions Park, brewing for years, are now percolating
Plans for a café at Costa Mesa’s Lions Park — a project brewing for nearly a decade — are beginning to percolate, after a construction crew recently broke ground on a plot of land at the recently renovated west-side community complex.
Officials Friday announced contractor Tovey/Shultz Construction, Inc. had mobilized near the Donald Dungan Library and Norma Hertzog Community Center, which respectively opened to the public in 2019 and 2021 after a years-long renovation and reconfiguration of the area.
Public Works Director Raja Sethurman said Friday while the café was part of the first building phase, lack of a funding source put plans on the back burner.
“The café was already designed as part of that project,” he said. “[But] it was excluded from that original Phase I because we didn’t know about the funding.”
A complete rebuild of the Lions Park playground, also known as Airplane Park, coincided with the unveiling of the community center in 2021 and constituted the second phase of the city’s Lions Park projects.
It wasn’t until 2022, when the city received a $1.2 million allocation from Orange County Supervisor Katrina Foley that the café concept was reawakened. By that time, its estimated total cost had risen from about $1.4 million to $2.3 million.
In the year that followed, public works officials executed a contract with Culver City’s Johnson Favaro, the same architectural firm that designed the library and community center, for the design of an 1,100-square-foot building large enough to accommodate food preparation and storage areas along with a staff restroom and other ancillary spaces.
County Supervisor Katrina Foley earmarked funds from a federal American Rescue Plan Act allocation to help complete two projects that have been on the city’s wish list for years.
Once completed, the space will offer snacks and beverages to walk-up customers through a service counter operated by a contracted concessionaire. The space will feature new landscaping, wood decking and perimeter seating adjacent to the city’s Downtown Recreation Center.
Sethuraman called the café, which does not yet have an official name, the final outstanding project in the city’s grand vision for the Lions Park area, which began to take shape in 2015.
“We wanted it to be a very active space for the community,” he said. “The Lions Park playground has been very well regarded as a high-quality playing area for kids and is being used really well by our community and people from the outside. The event lawn is being used extensively. The community center is being used for many, many events by the city, other agencies and private parties. [This] will be the last piece of the puzzle.”
If all goes well, the café could potentially be open for business by fall of 2025.
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