For years, if you asked a Cherry Hill resident where the action was, the answer was some combination of the mall and the Route 70 strip. That's still technically true in August 2026. What's changed is what those two addresses actually contain.
A nine-story office tower is gone. The Korean grocery half of Route 70 has been dark for more than a year. The mall has quietly swapped in four new tenants while nobody was paying attention. If you live here and you've been operating on a 2024 mental map of your own town, this is the month it stops being accurate.
The Route 70 corridor is turning into a Korean-Asian food stretch
The single biggest change is the one you can't see yet from the road. H-Mart Cherry Hill on Route 70 has been closed for a full remodel since summer 2025, with the lower-level grocery reworked and the upper level being built out as a Korean-Asian Market Eatery Food Hall. Reporting from 42Freeway pegs the reopening for late February to early March, with additional food hall tenants filtering in through the summer.
Two tenants are confirmed so far:
- KyoDong Noodle, the first announced food hall tenant, focused on Korean noodle dishes.
- JAWS Topokki & Gimbap, a Korean street-food brand that operates more than 300 stores in Korea with 15 years of franchising experience, with the Cherry Hill location listed on the company's own site as an expected July 2026 opening.
A reader tip to 42Freeway added that the finished food hall is expected to include Korean fried chicken, bubble tea, and sushi, and that the lineup will be different from the Philadelphia H-Mart food hall's, which is the kind of detail that matters if you're the type of resident who was already driving into the city for that experience.
A quarter mile east, the old Raku space has been taken over by Cherry Hill Eatery, which is running three concepts under one roof: The Wok for Chinese specialties, Mala Station for spicy hot pot, and Utepia Tea for bubble tea and dessert. As of a South Jersey Food Scene visit in May, the interior was almost finished and the operator was targeting a May opening.
Put those two projects on the same block of Route 70 and you have something Cherry Hill has never really had before: a walkable-adjacent cluster of Asian food concepts that doesn't require a trip to North Wales or Philadelphia's Chinatown. That's the corridor story, and it's the one your out-of-town friends will start asking you about first.
The mall is becoming a recreation venue with retail attached
The mall's real 2026 story isn't the four tenants that opened over the winter. It's what replaced One Cherry Hill.
The nine-story office building in the mall's parking lot has been demolished, and in its place PREIT is building a Dick's House of Sport. This is not a bigger sporting goods store. The complex at Cherry Hill Mall will offer a climbing wall, simulated golf bays, and a multi-sport cage to test out equipment for baseball, softball, lacrosse and soccer, plus an outdoor field on the former office-tower footprint. PREIT has said it's still on target to open sometime this calendar year.
If you have kids in travel sports or you've ever driven to Voorhees for indoor practice space, that changes the math on where you spend a Saturday morning.
The four smaller openings from earlier in the year are worth knowing about too, because they've been quietly redistributing foot traffic inside the mall:
- Suki Hana, fast-casual Japanese with teriyaki bowls, sushi, and hibachi-style plates.
- Coach, the handbag house, back in a full store.
- OFFLINE by Aerie, an activewear extension of the Aerie brand.
- POP MART, the Labubu-collectibles company in its first physical footprint here.
PREIT also confirmed lululemon is relocating into a more prominent spot inside the mall. Taken together, the tenant mix is drifting away from the department-store-plus-food-court model the mall was built on and toward a recreation-and-lifestyle blend that competes more directly with what Moorestown and Marlton have been doing.
Losing an office tower and gaining a climbing wall on the same parcel is the clearest picture you'll get of where suburban commercial real estate is heading in 2026.
The one August night that still belongs to the township, not a landlord
Amid all the new commercial development, the anchor community event of the month is still the same one it's been for years. National Night Out is Tuesday, August 4 at 6 p.m., hosted by Mayor Dave Fleisher, the Township Council, and the Cherry Hill Police Department. It's free, family-oriented, and stacked with demonstrations, music, games, and food.
The sponsor list this year is a decent snapshot of who is actively marketing to Cherry Hill households right now: New Jersey American Water, Great Clips, Park Royal Orthodontics, 3D Physical Therapy, Pella, The Bank of Princeton, Wild Fork, My Orthodontist, Raising Cane's, Randall's Restaurant, Wegmans, the Cherry Hill Alliance on Alcohol & Drug Abuse, and Adventure Kids Playcare. If you're new to the neighborhood, walking that event is one of the fastest ways to figure out which local businesses actually invest in the community versus which ones just buy Google ads for the zip code.
Two other quieter August calendar items worth knowing:
- Pop Up Story Time in the Park on Friday, August 14 at Croft Farm, 10:00 to 10:30 a.m. Run by Cherry Hill Recreation and the Public Library, no registration required.
- The Al Fresco Affair Food Truck Festival at Croft Farm, 100 Bortons Mill Road, 5:30 to 8:00 p.m., free admission with food and drink for purchase.
Both are the kind of low-key thing longtime residents forget to mention when out-of-town family visits.
The old map versus the new one
If it helps to see the shift laid out plainly:
| Address you already know | What it used to mean | What it means in August 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| H-Mart, Route 70 | Korean grocery run, closed since 2025 | Reopened grocery plus a Market Eatery Food Hall with KyoDong Noodle and JAWS Topokki confirmed |
| Former Raku space, Route 70 | Long-dark Japanese restaurant | Cherry Hill Eatery running The Wok, Mala Station, and Utepia Tea under one roof |
| One Cherry Hill office tower | Nine-story office building in the mall lot | Demolished; Dick's House of Sport with climbing wall, golf bays, and outdoor field under construction |
| Cherry Hill Mall interior | Department stores plus food court | Adds Coach, OFFLINE by Aerie, POP MART, Suki Hana; lululemon relocating |
| Croft Farm | Historic park most of the year | August 4 National Night Out and food truck festival anchor point |
None of these are speculative announcements from a five-year master plan. They are either open, under active construction, or on a calendar with a date attached.
Why this matters if you already own here
Two practical implications, and then a broader one.
First, if you've been telling yourself for the last two years that you have to leave town for a specific kind of Saturday, you probably don't anymore. The travel-sports family, the food hall enthusiast, the parent looking for a free weekday morning story time, and the collector who was ordering blind-box figures online now all have Cherry Hill addresses to work with.
Second, the retail mix inside your township directly affects what buyers see when they search for homes here in the fall. Cherry Hill's search snippets and out-of-town impressions are heavily shaped by what's on Route 70 and inside the mall. A recreation destination and a Korean food hall show up in relocation research differently than an empty office tower and a closed grocery store did. Owners tend to notice this later than agents do, but it lands eventually in list-to-sale ratios and days-on-market.
The broader point is that Cherry Hill spent a long time being defined by things that were built between 1961 and 1975. The 2026 additions are the first time in a while that the town's daily texture is being actively rewritten while current residents watch it happen. That's worth walking through in person before the out-of-town relatives start asking about it in October.
If you're curious what all of this does to home values on your specific street, or you're weighing whether to list this fall versus spring, Stephany Schlitz is one call away. Let's Connect — Get Your Free Home Valuation, and we'll talk through what the new Cherry Hill map means for your address specifically.
