For more than ten years, the old PNC Bank building at the front of the ShopRite plaza on Route 38 sat there doing nothing. Anyone who drives that stretch of Mount Laurel toward the 295 interchange has passed it hundreds of times: a squat brick box with a drive-through lane nobody used anymore, sitting empty in a parking lot that otherwise stays full from breakfast through dinner. It became one of those buildings you stop noticing.
It reopened on October 16, 2025, and what moved in explains something about how this corridor of town actually works now.
What's Actually Inside
The building is a Wonder location, part of a food hall concept that operates less like a restaurant and more like twenty restaurants sharing one kitchen and one front door. The Mount Laurel outpost, at 127 Ark Road in what's known as Larchmont Centre, brings together more than twenty chef-driven concepts under a single roof. The lineup includes Bobby Flay Steak, Streetbird by Marcus Samuelsson, Tejas Barbecue, Yasas by Michael Symon, and Di Fara Pizza, alongside cuisines spanning Mexican, Thai, Mediterranean, and more.
Here's the part that matters if you're planning to eat there tonight: there are about sixteen seats. You can order at a kiosk and eat on site if you're patient about finding a chair, but the building was designed around pickup and delivery, not a dining room experience. It's open daily from 10:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m., which is a longer window than most sit-down restaurants in town keep, because the whole point is that you can order from several different kitchens in a single transaction and have it ready at once.
That distinction, food hall versus food court, is easy to miss from the outside. A food court is a shared dining room with separate kitchens. Wonder is closer to a shared kitchen with a delivery engine attached. You are not walking in for a leisurely dinner. You are walking in, or more likely opening the app, because you want a Bobby Flay steak and someone else at your table wants Thai food, and you'd rather not place two separate orders from two separate apps.
It's Not a One-Off
Mount Laurel isn't the only South Jersey town getting one of these. Cherry Hill's Wonder location opened first, at Garden State Park, and by the time the Mount Laurel building had its ribbon cutting, a third location was already slated for a December 2025 opening at the Promenade at Sagemore in Marlton, right on Route 73.
| Town | Location | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Cherry Hill | Garden State Park | Opened first, 2025 |
| Mount Laurel | 127 Ark Road, Larchmont Centre (Route 38) | Opened October 16, 2025 |
| Marlton | The Promenade at Sagemore, Route 73 | Slated for a December 2025 opening |
Three locations within a few highway exits of each other isn't a coincidence. It's a company betting that South Jersey's commuter arteries, Route 38, Route 73, the roads people already drive every day between work and home, are the right places to put a building that exists mainly to get food into a car quickly. Mount Laurel didn't get picked because it needed another restaurant. It got picked because Route 38 already moves the kind of daily traffic that makes a pickup-first model work.
The Chick-fil-A Down the Road Tells the Same Story
If Wonder were the only new food news on this stretch, you could write it off as one company's strategy. But look at what's happening at Eastgate Square, the shopping center bordering Moorestown Mall, a few minutes further down Route 38. There's already a Chick-fil-A there, in front of Best Buy, and it isn't going anywhere yet. What got approved in November 2025 is a full relocation: an all-new building going up elsewhere in the same shopping center, in the parking area near ShopRite and Home Depot, built specifically around a two-lane drive-through and a larger kitchen. As of that approval, no construction start date had been set publicly, and the existing restaurant was expected to keep running through the build.
Nobody redesigns a Chick-fil-A for a bigger dining room. This project exists because the current building can't move enough cars through the line during a lunch rush, and the fix on the table is more lanes and more kitchen, not more seats.
Put those two projects next to each other and a pattern shows up that a single news item wouldn't reveal. Wonder and Chick-fil-A are solving the same problem in different ways: how do you serve more people, faster, without asking them to park and sit down. One building died as a bank and came back as a shared kitchen for a dozen or more brands. The other is relocating a working restaurant into a version of itself built to process more cars per hour. Neither is really about the food getting better. Both are about speed.
What This Actually Changes About Getting Dinner
If you live in Mount Laurel and your routine already runs along Route 38, here's the practical shift. That corridor near ShopRite is becoming the town's fastest way to get a meal from a name-brand kitchen without driving to Cherry Hill or Philadelphia for it. You can order a Bobby Flay steak or a Michael Symon dish from your phone on a Tuesday and have it ready by the time you've parked, without anyone in your house agreeing on one restaurant.
What it doesn't become is a place to plan an evening around. If you're looking for the kind of dinner where you sit for two hours, order a bottle of wine, and don't check your phone, that's still happening elsewhere in town, not at 127 Ark Road. The building's design, sixteen seats inside a former bank lobby, makes that clear enough without anyone having to say it directly.
A few things worth knowing before you go:
- Wonder Mount Laurel takes orders through its app, website, or in-store kiosk, and multiple restaurant orders arrive together in one pickup or delivery.
- The building sits in front of the ShopRite on Ark Road, with McDonald's across the lot and Prospectors visible across Route 38, so it's easy to spot even if you've never noticed the old bank before.
- If you're going for dine-in rather than pickup, expect limited seating and plan around it, especially during dinner hours.
The Bigger Picture for a Town That Keeps Filling In
None of this is really about one food hall. It's about what happens to a stretch of road once one long-vacant building finally gets a tenant, and that tenant turns out to be part of a bigger regional pattern rather than a local one-off. Mount Laurel didn't get a Wonder location because someone noticed an empty bank and thought a restaurant would look nice there. It got one because the town sits on a highway corridor that a fast-growing chain identified as worth investing in three times over, once in Cherry Hill, once here, once in Marlton.
That's a different kind of good news than "a new restaurant opened." It's a signal that the roads residents already use every day are getting more useful, not just busier. The old bank building isn't just full again. It's doing a job that fits how this part of town actually moves.
If you're weighing what a place like Mount Laurel offers day to day, beyond the schools and the square footage, this is the kind of detail that tells you more than a listing photo ever could. The team at Ray Moorhouse Real Estate Group has spent years watching this corridor change one building at a time, and we're always glad to talk through what a specific block or a specific commute actually looks like before you decide anything. If you're curious what your own Mount Laurel home is worth in a market that keeps shifting around it, reach out. What's My Home Worth?
