The Second Owl

As the sister to Signal Hill’s fast casual Thai and Laotian restaurant Owl Owl, The Second Owl opened in 2025 as a more upscale, just-below-white-tablecloth dining experience in Long Beach’s Belmont Shore neighborhood. While the clipboard-based menu has plenty of pages – initially for wines and other drinks – six dedicated to food reveal a compact collection of 20 savory dishes, plus three desserts to choose from.

Owing perhaps to its neighborhood, the Second Owl errs on the “fusion” side with its recipes, and some of the dishes are American – a “fresh greens” salad, standard filet mignon, and boysenberry pie dessert – rather than Thai or Lao. Try to order Thai and you may get your massaman curry-soaked portion of tender short rib ($28) with scoops of mashed potatoes and greens, while Thai fried chicken here is served both with sticky rice and a medium-sized papaya salad in a combo called The Belmont ($23). Noodles are among several “classic Thai” dishes that go for upwards of $20 per plate with basic meats, or more when seafood or pork belly are involved.

We enjoyed our drinks and really appreciated both the excellent service and generally nice environment, the latter unfortunately interrupted multiple times by loud noises from windows kept open to 2nd Street. But the recipes we sampled were what we’d call “good-ish” rather than great. Our favorite dishes were the Pad Seew, which was a fairly basic and hard to screw up soy/garlic wide noodle dish – here served with a choice of meats, including good, less expensive standard pork – and the Mango Rice dessert, which was packed with fresh, strongly flavored fruit and sweetened rice – but $15.