Drive past Cherry Hill Mall this month and you will pass two active construction stories within about half a mile of each other. One of them is finished, has already hosted its grand opening, and backed up traffic onto Route 70 West on day one. The other is still a demolished lot behind a fence, nearly a year into construction, with no announced opening date. It is easy to lump them together as one big neighborhood do-over. They are not the same project, they do not share an owner, and they are not running on the same clock. Sorting out which is which is the difference between knowing what you can actually walk into this weekend and waiting on something that is still just steel and permits.
The one that already reopened
H Mart's Route 70 store closed in June 2025 for what the company described as a full renovation, not a refresh. The store had operated for 25 years squeezed onto a single floor at the back of the D&Q Plaza. When it reopened on April 23, 2026, it came back as a two-floor, 39,000-square-foot building, roughly double its old footprint, with the grocery on the lower level and a new upstairs food hall called the Market Eatery.
The reopening drew the kind of crowd that says something about pent-up demand. By 10:30 a.m. on opening day, the parking lot was full and traffic was backing up onto Route 70 West. Cherry Hill police handled traffic in the lot. Lines formed at checkout and at the single elevator connecting the two floors.
"We are excited to reopen our newly renovated Cherry Hill location," H Mart president Brian Kwon said at the opening.
The food hall launched with six vendors, including Paris Baguette and KyoDong Noodle, with JAWS Topokki and Gimbap also confirmed to join the lineup. H Mart has said more concepts could be added later in the year as the space fills out, so the current list is a starting point, not the finished picture.
Worth knowing if you are weighing options: H Mart is not the only Asian grocery in town. Hung Vuong, a Philadelphia-based chain, has operated a 62,000-square-foot store on Brace Road since 2020, also with adjacent restaurants. Both stores keep live fish in tanks and stock produce like durian, dragon fruit, and jackfruit that is harder to find at conventional supermarkets. If you have been going to one out of habit, the other has been sitting a few minutes away the whole time.
The one that is not open yet
Half a mile up the road, Cherry Hill Mall's owner, PREIT, demolished the nine-story One Cherry Hill office building in the summer of 2025 to make room for a Dick's House of Sport. That is a different scale of project entirely: 120,000 square feet across two floors, plus an 18,500-square-foot outdoor track and field, with a climbing wall, TrackMan golf simulator bays, and a multi-sport cage for baseball, softball, lacrosse, and soccer built in.
Demolition wrapped in late summer 2025, and PREIT said at the time that construction was tentatively expected to begin that fall. As of this writing, no firm 2026 opening date has been set. The mall's own site still reads simply "Opening in 2026." New Jersey's first House of Sport opened at Newport Centre in Jersey City last September, about a year ahead of Cherry Hill's planned unveiling, so there is a template for what the format looks like once it lands here.
In the meantime, the mall's food court entrance stays closed for construction, though the food court itself remains reachable from inside the mall. PREIT has also said 230 parking spaces will be temporarily eliminated during the build, with a modest net gain once the project is done.
What has actually already landed at the mall
This is the part that gets lost when people talk about "the mall project" as one thing. Several new tenants have already opened while House of Sport construction continues around them. Coach, OFFLINE by Aerie, POP MART, and the fast-casual Suki Hana all opened in the same wave earlier this year. Lululemon is expanding into a larger, more prominent spot in the mall. None of that required waiting on Dick's timeline. It happened on its own schedule, tenant by tenant, while the bigger anchor project kept working through permits and steel.
So if your mental model of Cherry Hill Mall right now is "still under construction," that is only half true. The retail wing has been quietly filling in. The sports complex is the piece still on hold.
The smaller turnover most people actually notice day to day
The two headline projects get the attention, but they are not the only thing changing on the ground. A handful of smaller storefront swaps have been just as visible if you eat out in town regularly:
- Santucci's, known locally for square pizza with the sauce layered above the cheese, quietly opened a new Cherry Hill location.
- Bao Mama opened its doors in the township.
- 85°C Bakery Cafe, the Taiwan-founded chain with hundreds of locations worldwide, arrived in Cherry Hill last year.
- Cherry Hill Eatery took over the Route 70 space that Raku vacated, bringing three concepts under one roof: The Wok for Chinese specialties, Mala Station for hot pot, and Utepia Tea for bubble tea and dessert.
- Bryson's Pub, a two-decade fixture in town, has an uncertain future, with no word yet on what comes next for the space.
None of these are tied to the mall or to H Mart's renovation. They are the ordinary churn of a busy commercial corridor, and taken together they mean the food and retail map you had memorized a year ago is already out of date in more places than the two big headline projects.
Why the mix-up happens
Both big projects sit on Route 70, both involve demolition or near-total teardown before rebuilding, and both generated similar headlines about square footage and grand openings. It is a reasonable mental shortcut to fold them into one storyline. But H Mart is a private grocery chain that owns its own renovation timeline, and PREIT is a mall operator managing a much larger, multi-tenant anchor project on a separate parcel. One dealt with a nine-month closure and came back swinging. The other tore down a nine-story building and is still working through the harder, slower parts of a ground-up construction project. Different companies, different permits, different finish lines.
If you have been holding off on trying the new food hall because you assumed the whole corridor was still torn up, that assumption is out of date. The grocery and its six food vendors have been open and serving customers since late April. If you have been checking the mall's website every few months hoping for a House of Sport date, that part of the wait is real, and there is nothing published yet to shorten it.
Cherry Hill changes in pieces, not all at once, and the pieces do not always move together. Watching Route 70 closely enough to know which fence is temporary and which building already reopened is its own kind of local knowledge, the sort that only comes from actually paying attention to the neighborhood instead of skimming a headline about "the mall project" and assuming it covers everything.
If you are keeping an eye on how Cherry Hill is changing, whether that is a new food hall down the street or how a project like this might eventually shape home values nearby, I am always glad to talk through what it means for the neighborhood. Reach out to Quandell Iglesia anytime. Let's Connect.
