Restaurants in Costa Mesa, CA

Costa Mesa's 109,131 residents are paired with 832 places listed in this guide, including 624 restaurants, 47 quick service spots, 81 cafes and 65 bars. Coffee shops and cafes lead the category counts at 85, followed by Japanese and Mexican at 70 each in the listings.

With 76.2 listed places per 10,000 residents, Costa Mesa sits above the 41.8 median for all cities in this guide. The number describes the listings in this guide, not every business operating in the city.

574 listings are independent; the chains that show up most are Starbucks (16), Subway (10), Flame Broiler (7) and McDonald's (6).

In the Servestack Independent Restaurant Index, Costa Mesa ranks #102 of 332 large US cities for the share of places that are independent.

Food in Costa Mesa by cuisine

Own a restaurant in Costa Mesa?

755 of the 832 places here (91%) list a website. When a guest searches for food in Costa Mesa and lands on a delivery app instead of your site, the app takes a commission on the order and shows them your competitors. Servestack gives you your own ordering site with zero commission, POS sync and loyalty, and Studio makes the menus, flyers and posts to promote it. See what you would keep with the commission savings calculator, or browse the restaurant marketing guides.

Place data from the Overture Maps Foundation (overturemaps.org), which includes data from Meta, Microsoft and Foursquare, used under the CDLA Permissive 2.0 and Apache 2.0 licenses. Restaurants open, close and move; check with the restaurant before you go. Data refreshed 2026-10-11.