One of San Diego's most celebrated bakeries has finally found the second location it has been searching for, and it is moving into a restaurant space that hasn't even officially closed yet. Izola Artisan Bakery announced it will open its next bakeshop at Longfellow Real Estate Partners' Biovista campus in Sorrento Mesa, taking over the sprawling indoor-outdoor space currently occupied by celebrity chef Richard Blais' California English.
Izola founders Jeffrey Brown and Jenny Chen announced the expansion this week after spending more than a year searching for a location they believed could support the bakery's next stage of growth. The new Izola is targeting an opening by the end of 2026 at the Biovista life-science campus at 9276 Scranton Road, situated near the intersection of Mira Mesa Boulevard and Scranton Road between UTC and Del Mar.
"After more than a year of looking, walking spaces, imagining what they might become, and saying no when something didn't feel right, we found it: the next IZOLA," the company announced. Brown and Chen said they had wanted to expand into another part of San Diego for some time but didn't want to add locations simply for the sake of growing.
The location should give Izola considerably more room to create the community-oriented bakery experience the founders have increasingly emphasized. California English occupies an approximately 6,000-square-foot indoor-outdoor restaurant space at Biovista, complete with an expansive patio and veranda overlooking the campus' landscaped outdoor gathering area.
Izola founders Jeffrey Brown and Jenny Chen announced the expansion this week after spending more than a year searching for a location they believed could support the bakery's next stage of growth. The new Izola is targeting an opening by the end of 2026 at the Biovista life-science campus at 9276 Scranton Road, situated near the intersection of Mira Mesa Boulevard and Scranton Road between UTC and Del Mar.
"After more than a year of looking, walking spaces, imagining what they might become, and saying no when something didn't feel right, we found it: the next IZOLA," the company announced. Brown and Chen said they had wanted to expand into another part of San Diego for some time but didn't want to add locations simply for the sake of growing.
The location should give Izola considerably more room to create the community-oriented bakery experience the founders have increasingly emphasized. California English occupies an approximately 6,000-square-foot indoor-outdoor restaurant space at Biovista, complete with an expansive patio and veranda overlooking the campus' landscaped outdoor gathering area.
Izola specifically highlighted the property's indoor-outdoor layout and sunlit green as major attractions, envisioning a bakery where customers can linger over coffee, families can spend time together and hot croissants can continuously emerge from the ovens. The founders said their relationship with Longfellow was ultimately another deciding factor, describing the real estate company's approach to hospitality and community as closely aligned with Izola's own philosophy.
The announcement also solves the mystery surrounding what would replace California English. Earlier this month, SanDiegoVille broke the news that the Richard Blais-backed restaurant would permanently close after approximately three and a half years, with its final day of service announced for Friday, September 25.
California English opened in February 2023 as one of the signature amenities at Longfellow's Biovista campus. Conceived by Blais as a collision of Southern California cooking and classic British fare, the restaurant debuted with fish & chips, Scotch eggs, Sunday roast, afternoon tea, brunch and a full bar program inside a space intended to draw both employees from the surrounding life-science companies and diners from throughout San Diego.
Although California English launched as a Blais concept, more recent day-to-day operations have been overseen by the local hospitality team behind Hillcrest's Common Stock and Bankers Hill's Books & Records. Common Stock co-founder Brian Douglass previously told SanDiegoVille that Longfellow approached his group about potentially taking over the lease, but the company declined as it balanced its existing San Diego restaurants and another project in Orange County.
Douglass also told SanDiegoVille at the time that another operator had already been lined up for the property. Izola's announcement now reveals the identity of that incoming tenant and represents a significant shift for the Biovista space, replacing a full-service celebrity-chef restaurant with one of San Diego's most prominent homegrown bakery brands.
For Izola, the opening will mark another remarkable step in a story that began with 12 croissants being lowered from a third-floor East Village window during the COVID-19 pandemic. Brown and Chen founded the business in 2020 after returning from Europe and experimenting with bread and pastry making while quarantined, eventually using rock-climbing equipment to lower preordered baked goods from Brown's former photography studio to customers on the sidewalk.
What started as a pandemic experiment exploded in popularity. As restrictions disappeared, Izola transformed the loft into a café, lines formed outside, demand surged and Yelp named Izola the No. 1 bakery in the United States in 2022.
That rapid growth eventually created serious operational problems. Izola was still operating its original location under a Class B Cottage Food Operation permit intended for small home-based food businesses even as the bakery grew to dozens of employees and was generating revenue far beyond the permit's limits.
County regulators ultimately forced Izola to either dramatically reduce its operation or upgrade to a fully permitted commercial facility. The bakery closed its original 710 13th Street location in October 2023 and eventually abandoned plans to renovate the space, instead moving into the former Amplified Ale Works and ModBom property at 1429 Island Avenue beside Fault Line Park.
Izola reopened there in 2024 with a substantially larger bakery and café supported by a basement preparation kitchen. The Island Avenue location has since become the company's flagship, serving its signature sourdough and laminated pastries alongside an ever-changing collection of unconventional croissants incorporating everything from bibimbap and carnitas to wine-poached pears.
The Sorrento Mesa expansion is part of a much larger growth plan Brown and Chen have been quietly assembling. Earlier this year, SanDiegoVille reported that Izola was developing an approximately 5,000-square-foot centralized dough production facility in City Heights that would eventually supply multiple retail locations.
The proposed production model calls for Izola's pastry team to mix, shape and freeze unbaked products at the centralized facility before sending them to individual bakeshops for proofing and baking on site. Brown has previously pointed to restaurant companies such as Din Tai Fung as examples of how centralized production can allow a business to expand while attempting to maintain consistency across multiple locations.
The company previously described the City Heights production facility and related expansion as a project potentially costing approximately $7.5 million. Izola raised more than $1.6 million from community investors through Mainvest before that investment platform ceased operations in 2024, leaving participating businesses responsible for continuing their obligations to investors without Mainvest serving as intermediary.
Earlier this year, Brown and Chen confirmed they were negotiating for a second retail bakery in North County but declined to reveal its location. The Biovista announcement appears to be the culmination of that search, although Sorrento Mesa sits farther south than what is traditionally considered coastal North County.
It also creates an interesting bit of continuity for Longfellow. When California English opened, the real estate developer promoted the restaurant as part of a broader effort to transform its life-science campuses from conventional office environments into places where employees and surrounding residents could eat, drink and gather.
That strategy originally included plans for Blais to create another restaurant at Longfellow's nearby Bioterra development, but the second concept never materialized. California English's closure effectively ends that particular vision, while Izola now gives Longfellow another opportunity to make the Biovista restaurant space a destination beyond the surrounding biotech offices.
For Brown and Chen, however, the expansion is being framed less as a conventional second unit than an extension of the community that formed around Izola downtown. The couple credited their employees and customers with giving them the confidence to expand and said the atmosphere that developed at Island Avenue was something they could never have manufactured themselves.
"There is a LOT of work between here and opening day," Izola's founders cautioned in announcing the project, promising to document the process as construction and preparations move forward.
California English remains scheduled to operate through September 25 at 9276 Scranton Road in San Diego's Sorrento Mesa. Izola is aiming to open its new Biovista bakeshop in the same space by the end of 2026, while its existing bakery remains open at 1429 Island Avenue in downtown San Diego's East Village.
For more information about Izola, visit izolabakery.com.
Originally published on September 22, 2026.