Drive Nixon Drive from the ShopRite side of East Gate Square toward Route 38 and you pass two buildings that have spent the last three years telling opposite stories about what it actually takes to open something new in Mount Laurel.
One is a squat former bank branch that sat empty for over a decade. As of this past October it's a food hall with more than twenty restaurant concepts running out of one kitchen. The other is a long-vacant Mexican restaurant that a national chain signed a lease for back in 2023, got township approval to demolish and rebuild in 2024, and still hasn't turned a shovel. Its construction clock was set to run out at the end of this month.
If you've been watching East Gate Square wondering why some projects seem to appear out of nowhere while others stall for years, the answer isn't money, and it isn't township red tape treating one applicant better than another. It's about what each business is actually trying to build.
The Bank That Became a Food Hall in a Season
The Wonder location at 127 Ark Road took over a former PNC Bank building that had been empty for over a decade. By June of last year, crews had already gutted the interior and were reworking the front facade to add windows. By October 16, the company held its ribbon cutting, its second South Jersey location after Cherry Hill and its third already announced for the Promenade at Sagemore in Marlton.
What Wonder actually opened wasn't a single restaurant. It's a delivery-and-pickup operation running more than twenty restaurant concepts out of one commercial kitchen, including:
- Bobby Flay Steak
- Streetbird by Marcus Samuelsson
- Tejas Barbecue
- Yasas by Michael Symon
- Di Fara Pizza
Seating inside tops out around sixteen, because seating was never really the point. The building didn't need a themed exterior or a signature dining room. It needed a gutted interior, a commercial kitchen, and enough parking to handle a stream of delivery drivers. That's a fast build, because almost none of the value is in the shell.
The Restaurant That Missed Its Own Deadline
A few hundred yards away sits the former Don Pablo's, closed since 2018, one year before the Tex-Mex chain itself shut down nationally. Lazy Dog Restaurant & Bar signed on for the site in 2023 and won Mount Laurel Planning Board approval in August 2024 to demolish the old building and put up its first South Jersey location, complete with the Rocky Mountain lodge look the chain is known for nationally.
That approval came with a two-year window to start construction. That window was set to close at the end of August 2026, this month. Instead, a Mount Laurel township employee told TAPinto that Lazy Dog is submitting an entirely new application for a redesigned building, expected to go before the Planning Board in November.
"We don't have any new timing or development updates to share publicly right now."
That's what a Lazy Dog spokesperson told TAPinto when asked directly about the delay. TAPinto's own review of Lazy Dog's national track record shows a wide range: a Buffalo Grove, Illinois location went from approval to opening in under eighteen months, while a Mira Mesa, California site approved in late 2024 isn't expected to open until 2027.
The pattern isn't Mount Laurel-specific. It's a Lazy Dog pattern. The chain builds a full architectural concept, wood and stone lodge details included, on every site, and that concept doesn't drop cleanly into an existing shell the way a ghost kitchen does.
What the Same Shopping Center Reveals
East Gate Square gives you a third data point, and it lines up with the first two. Ace Pickleball Club opened in October 2025 in former Michaels and Staples space at 1191 Nixon Drive, roughly six months after receiving zoning approval that April. Like Wonder, it's a business whose core requirement is square footage and courts, not a signature building envelope.
| Business | Building | Approval | Status as of August 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wonder Food Hall | Former PNC Bank, 127 Ark Road | Construction visible June 2025 | Opened October 16, 2025 |
| Ace Pickleball Club | Former Michaels/Staples, 1191 Nixon Drive | Zoning approval April 2025 | Opened October 2025 |
| Lazy Dog Restaurant & Bar | Former Don Pablo's, Nixon Drive | Planning Board approval August 2024 (signed 2023) | New application pending, November 2026 hearing |
There's a wrinkle worth knowing if you live nearby: Ace Pickleball's approval came from Moorestown's Zoning Board, not Mount Laurel's, even though the shopping center is generally referred to as Mount Laurel's East Gate Square and the Lazy Dog site a few hundred feet away went through Mount Laurel's Planning Board. The property line runs through the parking lot. Depending on which pad a new tenant leases, the approval path changes townships entirely, which is part of why timelines across the same shopping center can look so inconsistent from the road.
What's Actually Coming Next
The Chick-fil-A near Best Buy is staying open through all of this. Its relocation to a new, larger building near Home Depot and ShopRite requires demolishing the former Bertucci's and Wendy's buildings first, a full rebuild rather than a reuse. Once that's done, Zaxby's, the Georgia-based chicken chain making its first push into New Jersey, is set to convert the vacated original Chick-fil-A building. The target for Mount Laurel is the first quarter of 2027, timed entirely to when Chick-fil-A's new building is finished. Zaxby's opened its first New Jersey restaurant in Magnolia this past December and is targeting more than sixty new locations nationally in 2026, so the chain itself isn't slow. Mount Laurel's timeline is dictated entirely by the Chick-fil-A construction ahead of it.
That's a fourth confirmation of the same rule. New construction from the ground up runs on a predictable, if not fast, calendar. A themed rebuild inside a shell that wasn't built for it does not.
Farther Down the Corridor
Not everything on this stretch is mid-project. Monterey Prime American Grill, the 9,500 square foot steakhouse the Dave Magrogan Group built inside the Aloft Hotel on Fellowship Road, opened its doors and has been running long enough that it's now just part of the regular rotation, with live music several nights a week. And Amma's South Indian Cuisine, already established in Voorhees and Philadelphia, opened its fourth location in Mount Laurel last year, another example of an operator moving into an existing space without needing to reinvent the building around it.
Put the whole corridor side by side and the lesson holds. The businesses that treat an existing building as a container tend to open on the timeline they announce. The ones that treat the building as part of the brand tend to take longer, sometimes years longer, no matter how big the company behind them is.
If you're the kind of person who tracks what's happening in your own neighborhood block by block, that's a more useful way to read the next "coming soon" sign in East Gate Square than just guessing at an opening date.
For more on what's happening in the neighborhoods we work in every day, or if you have questions about a home in Mount Laurel or the surrounding towns, reach out to The Holloway Real Estate Group and get in touch.