Dolores—Chef Luis Navarro and Brenda Rivera’s reimagining of its previous iteration, The Social List—really is the comfort zone of 4th Street. And its brunch menu, an international affair that reflects the traditions of Californian breakfast, is no exception.
“There are some people doing really great things,” Chef Luis said. “But Dolores really is about comfort food. We want you to seek the familiar in the hopes of getting it. That’s the direction we opted to go.”
Dolores eschews the pressure to be different by going all in on the classics for brunch.
There is a particular pressure surrounding brunch in Long Beach right now: Be different. And that pressure has resulted in some genuinely great food.
Due Fiori has built an Italian-Californian brunch where the meal feels unmistakably like Due Fiori. Zuzu’s Petals has turned brunch into something seasonal, if not almost decadent. And even The Breakfast Bar—one of the city’s OG contemporary brunch spaces—recently tapped Chef Johnathan Benvenuti to sharpen its deeply personal menu into something fresher.
And then there is Dolores. Chef Luis and Brenda could have used brunch as yet another opportunity to prove something. Instead, Dolores has gone in almost the exact opposite direction: It is leaning hard into the very reason brunch became brunch in California in the first place.
Omelettes. Breakfast burritos. Chilaquiles. Pancakes. Eggs. Potatoes. Bacon. The classics.
Dolores’s brunch is less about reinventing breakfast and more about understanding why we love it.
There is a tendency, particularly as Long Beach’s culinary scene becomes more ambitious, to equate creativity with complication. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing; the city is eating better because chefs are taking more risks, restaurants are becoming more specific in their identities, and diners are increasingly willing to follow them down those rabbit holes.
But sometimes you just want breakfast.
Not a dish that requires an explanation. Not something whose culinary lineage needs a paragraph of context before you dig in. You want a giant breakfast burrito made with the famed Chori-Man’s mango habanero chorizo that you can pick up with both hands. Or you want chilaquiles buried beneath eggs and crema. You want an omelette with hash browns—not potatoes O’Brien or on the side. You want pancakes.
A look into brunch at Dolores…
Californian. Mexican. American. It all makes sense when you just dive directly into it.
Creole Crab Cake Eggs Benedict ($23): jumbo lump blue crab | shrimp | crawfish | poached eggs | hollandaise sauce | spring salad
Chilaquiles ($19): corn chips | salsa roja | sliced red onion | crema | queso ranchero | two eggs | Upgrade to spicy verde +$1
Buttermilk Pancakes ($15): three buttermilk pancakes | honey butter | maple syrup | Add blueberries or bananas +$3
Short Rib Omelet ($20): braised short rib | onions | mushrooms | cheddar cheese | hash brown or fresh berries | sourdough or honey wheat
Breakfast Burrito ($16): eggs | bacon | bell peppers | onions | Jack cheese | avocado | hash browns | pico de gallo | Substitute local maple habanero chorizo +$4
Frittata Omelet ($18): mushrooms | spinach | tomato | bell pepper | onion | Jack cheese | hash browns or fresh berries | toast | sourdough or honey wheat
Classic Diner Breakfast ($21): two eggs | two bacon or sausage links | hash browns | toast
Upgrade to pancakes or French toast +$4
Challah French Toast ($17): thick-cut challah bread French toast | fresh berries | honey butter
Eggs Benedict ($20): poached egg | Canadian bacon | hollandaise sauce | spring salad
Dolores was a massive gamble for Chef Luis and Brenda.
It is easy, now, to look at Dolores’s increasingly busy dining room and forget just how risky the restaurant was.
The Social List wasn’t some struggling concept desperately needing to be saved. For 12 years, it was one of 4th Street’s most dependable neighborhood hangs—a place that became woven into Retro Row precisely because it never seemed overly concerned with becoming a destination restaurant. It was a place for a burger and beer, happy hour, a cocktail, dinner before a movie at the Art Theatre, or another stop during a night wandering the neighborhood.
Its entire ethos could practically be summarized by something Chef Luis told me years ago: “We’re not here to reinvent anything. We’re here to make people feel comfortable.”
Closing a restaurant like that—or, more accurately, killing its name and transforming it—is infinitely scarier than replacing something that simply isn’t working.
But Chef Luis and Brenda had been thinking about the change for years.
An ode to Chef Luis’s mother is the real reason behind Dolores.
The idea began taking shape as far back as 2019, before the pandemic interrupted plans for a larger remodel. The name itself wouldn’t arrive until 2022, when Chef Luis was traveling through Spain with Chef Susana Trilling. He woke up one morning in Cadaqués, turned to Brenda and told her the new restaurant had to carry his mother’s name: Dolores. Their son Isaak—the mastermind behind Good Luck Vinyl Club at Dolores—embraced the idea and helped develop its visual identity; logos and design elements followed in 2023. What looked to diners like a sudden rebrand had actually been simmering for years.
And the name carries considerably more weight than branding.
Maria Dolores Navarro—Lola to her friends and family—came to Long Beach from Guadalajara in 1972 with $50, her recipes, and a dream of eventually owning a restaurant. That dream became Lola’s Mexican Cuisine in 2008, the restaurant that helped introduce Long Beach diners to her Jalisciense-style birria long before birria became one of Southern California’s defining food obsessions.
Dolores, then, isn’t merely another restaurant in the Navarro Hospitality Group portfolio.
“This is Brenda and my next chapter—and our last chapter,” Chef Luis told me when the restaurant debuted. “If this is going to be our last hurrah, we wanted to do it right. This is the soul of what we do.”
And that soul remains comfort food.
That is the thread connecting The Social List to Dolores.
Dolores might look more mature. The cooking is unquestionably more confident. Chef Luis has dishes like house-made pappardelle swimming in Taleggio-truffle cream, steak frites with peppercorn cream, yuzu-dressed tuna crudo, and shrimp toast paired with a wonderfully rich curry sauce—food that demonstrated immediately that Dolores was capable of moving beyond what its predecessor had been.
But Chef Luis has resisted calls to turn the restaurant into fine dining. That would misunderstand the point.
The Social List succeeded because it belonged to 4th Street. Dolores wants to do the same thing, only through the lens of who Chef Luis and Brenda are now rather than who they were when The Social List opened more than a decade ago. As Chef Luis put it when Dolores opened, they built their lives on this block. They understand the neighborhood and its diversity, and they intend to remain a neighborhood restaurant.
Brunch might be the clearest expression of that philosophy yet. The trick is making familiar food worth returning for. With Dolores, they seem to have discovered they never actually gave up the comfort itself.
They just gave it their mother’s name.
Dolores is located at 2105 E. 4th St.
