Revival
In August 2006, blogger Christian Ziebarth posted a remembrance page on his year old Orange County Mexican Restaurants blog site on how he missed the defunct Naugles restaurant chain and wanted Del Taco to bring back some of the old but unique Naugles food items.[12][13] In a short time, he received comments from hundreds of others who felt the same. So much interest was generated by his webpage that a Del Taco public relations staffer contacted Ziebarth to see how Del Taco could take advantage of this renewed interest.[13]
On May 31, 2012, the Orange County Register reported that a group was attempting to revive the Naugles brand.[14] On July 9, 2013, the OC Weekly ran a similar story, with the author of the piece mentioning he had tried some Naugles taco sauce.[15]
On March 31, 2015, Christian Ziebarth (President), Josh Maxwell (CEO) and Dan Dvorak (CMO) won the judgment from the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board,[16][17][18] allowing the group to use the name to start a new restaurant in Fountain Valley, California. In the years since first applying to take up the Naugles trademark and menu (back in 2010), Ziebarth and chef John Smittle went on to re-create the original menu and its flavors from scratch, and Ziebarth, Maxwell and Dvorak began hosting pop-ups at various locations to further gather ground support.[15]
Ziebarth, Maxwell and Dvorak decided to open a "test" kitchen on Mt. Langley Street in Fountain Valley to help shape the brand and on July 25, 2015, the Fountain Valley location had a soft opening primarily for fans from an unofficial Facebook fan page.[19] For the first few days, the restaurant was inundated by fans, ran out of food several times, and was forced to close early due to lack of supplies.[20]
The revived Naugles opened its first daily operating location on the Pacific Coast Highway in Huntington Beach on May 28, 2016, taking over a former Wahoo's Fish Taco across from the Waterfront Hilton.[21] The initial lease was for the summer of 2016. The lease was renewed and had served as a beach front seasonal location until it closed at the end of summer of 2021.[22]
A second Huntington Beach location on Warner Avenue opened briefly during the summer of 2017[23][24] before disappearing a few weeks later.
A third location was opened on Beach Boulevard in Stanton in January 2020.[25] This location had outdoor seating, a drive thru, and limited indoor seating.[26]
Naugles briefly opened a location on Artesia Boulevard in Artesia in April 2023[27] only to close it seven months later.[28]
During the summer of 2024, Naugles briefly had a pop-up that operated from May to September at the Bolsa Chica State Beach.[29][30] The following year, the company decided to go into a different direction with the introduction of a food truck in March 2025.[31]
A decade after the debut of the revived brand, a writer for Mashed pointed out that although the revival was very successful from both a legal and cultural standpoint, it is not necessarily the large cash generating enterprise as first envisioned by their founders[32] based upon the short duration of multiple failed locations tried so far.[33]
