For nine years, the detached box at 3551 9th St SW sat empty. Toys R Us walked away in 2017, and the concrete pad next to Red Robin turned into the kind of quiet corner residents stopped noticing. This summer, that building becomes a 31,000-square-foot international grocery with an eight-stall food hall attached. It is the single largest change to how evenings feel on South Hill in a decade, and it is landing in the same season that Sunrise Village runs free live music on Tuesdays and classic-car meetups every Saturday through August.
If you already live here, you have watched the South Hill Mall corridor cycle through announcements for years without much showing up on the ground. That pattern is breaking in the next eight weeks.
The thesis of this summer: for the first time, the mall district gives you a reason to be there after 6 PM three nights a week, and none of those reasons are shopping.
What's Actually Opening In The Old Toys R Us
The building will operate as the South Hill Asian Center. On one side, an international grocery. On the other, a food court built around a communal dining area. This will be the chain's fourth location for Hong Kong Market, which first opened in Kent in 2008. Owner Brian Hoang told The News Tribune that, over time, they expanded to Federal Way and Burien. Now, they're branching out in Pierce County.
The grocery is broader than the name suggests. Hoang has described the focus as international rather than strictly Asian, with Middle Eastern ingredients and aisles of American groceries alongside the Asian selection. The comparison he draws is to a Safeway or Whole Foods, not a specialty store.
The food hall is where the neighborhood impact is more interesting. Five of the eight stalls are already claimed: Mr. Dim Sum for Chinese dumplings and buns, Pho J for Vietnamese soups, Natalie's Sugarcane and Dessert for sugarcane drinks and sweets, Asia Xpress for build-your-own bowls, and an as-yet-unnamed Korean vendor, with Hoang still courting taco, burger, and ramen concepts to round out the mix.
| Stall | What they serve |
|---|---|
| Mr. Dim Sum | Chinese dumplings and buns |
| Pho J | Vietnamese pho and soups |
| Natalie's Sugarcane and Dessert | Sugarcane drinks, Vietnamese sweets |
| Asia Xpress | Build-your-own bowls (bulgogi, yakisoba, kimbap, banh mi) |
| Korean vendor (TBA) | To be announced |
| Three remaining stalls | Under negotiation (taco, burger, ramen concepts in discussion) |
Openings are planned for this fall, with the mall and its parent company Cafaro Co. having described a summer 2026 debut for the building itself. Timelines have slipped before on this project, so the practical read is: watch the parking lot behind Red Robin. When the signage goes up on 94th Avenue East, it is real.
The Sunrise Village End Of The Equation
The other pole of South Hill's summer evening is a mile north at Sunrise Village. Two recurring programs run through August, and both are free.
The Tuesday concert series runs from July 7 through August 4, 2026, 6 to 8 PM. The format is lawn chairs, dinner from the on-site restaurants, and live bands, with beer gardens as part of the setup. Saltwater Sky opened the season on July 7, mixing country, rock, and current hits.
The Saturday Cruz-Ins are the sleeper. The free classic-car meetup runs every Saturday from June through August in the northeast lot behind LA Fitness, 5 PM to dusk, with attendees encouraged to bring a food-bank donation. It is not marketed heavily outside the car community, which is exactly why it stays walkable rather than jammed. If you have not wandered through it, this is the summer.
A Weekday-By-Weekday Rhythm You Can Actually Use
The three anchors line up neatly across the week. A South Hill resident who wanted to spend the rest of summer using the neighborhood the way it is actually built could rotate through this:
- Tuesday evening. Sunrise Village concert, dinner from one of the pad restaurants, home by 8:30.
- Saturday late afternoon. Cruz-Ins behind LA Fitness before dinner. Bring canned goods.
- A rotating third night. Once the food hall opens, an early weeknight dim sum or pho run to the South Hill Asian Center. Communal seating means you do not need a reservation, and eight stalls means the group-with-different-cravings problem solves itself.
The reason this is a shift and not just a listicle: none of those three anchors existed in this form five years ago. The mall was a daytime errand. Sunrise Village had programming, but not this cadence. The old Toys R Us was a symbol of what South Hill was not becoming.
The Car-Show Weekends Worth Planning Around
If Cruz-Ins is the low-key weekly version, the Puyallup Fairgrounds hosts the destination weekends. All of these are close enough to South Hill that traffic on Meridian and 9th Street SW is a real consideration, not a rumor:
- Prowl XLII at South Hill Mall, Saturday July 11, 9 AM.
- 14th Annual Car Show 4 Kids, Saturday July 18, 9 AM, 849 S Meridian.
- 38th Griot's Garage Pacific Northwest Nationals, Friday July 24, 8 AM, Washington State Fair Event Center.
- Goodguys Car Show, Saturday July 25 and Sunday July 26, Washington State Fair Event Center.
- Hot Barker Nights, Saturday August 8, 10 AM, Washington State Fairgrounds.
Two consecutive weekends of Fairgrounds car events in late July is a genuine planning fact. If you live on the west side of the hill and normally cut through the Fairgrounds side of Meridian on Saturday mornings, don't.
The Other Mall Additions That Actually Matter To Residents
Hong Kong Market is the headline, but it is landing on top of a two-year retenanting cycle at the mall that residents may have half-registered without adding up. Recent additions include Fan Zone, Goldfish Swim School, Royal Pizza Point, Tea Story, Gyro Twist, and Slime City. Discount Collection took the former Macy's space, a two-story 114,400-square-foot store on the west side of the mall near Round 1. A Barnes & Noble opened last October. A five-story, 108-unit Homewood Suites by Hilton is nearing completion on the property.
Read together, these are not random tenant announcements. They are a landlord, Cafaro Co., pushing the 37-year-old mall at the junction of State Route 512 and Meridian toward being a community activity hub rather than a retail-only site. The Homewood Suites in particular changes the math on the property, because a 108-key hotel means the corridor now has to support weekday dinner traffic that wasn't there before. The food hall opening at the same time is not a coincidence.
Why This Summer Matters More Than Last Summer
South Hill has always had the pieces to support an evening scene. Density around Meridian, an outdoor shopping center already built for foot traffic, Mount Rainier sightlines that make golden-hour matter. What has been missing is the reason to actually go out on a Tuesday when there is nothing on your calendar.
Free concerts fix that on Tuesdays. Cruz-Ins fix it on Saturdays. The Asian Center food hall, when it opens, fixes it on the other five nights, because a communal-seating food court with eight vendors is a low-commitment plan that makes it easy to text a neighbor at 5:45 and be eating by 6:15. That is the thing South Hill has genuinely lacked.
The residents who benefit most from this shift are the ones who already live within a mile or two of Meridian and 94th and have been driving north to Tacoma or south to Sumner for anything that felt like an evening out. The math on that trip changes by Labor Day.
If you have been watching South Hill change and are starting to think about what your own home is worth in a neighborhood that is finally getting the evening infrastructure to match its daytime one, Franklin Home Team tracks South Hill block by block and would be glad to run the numbers with you. What's Your Home Worth?
