La Habra’s New Restaurants and Mega Mart’s Planned Opening

Drive past 1610 West Imperial Highway in La Habra and you've probably wondered the same thing everyone else has for months: what goes into a building that big once a grocery chain gives up on it? Amazon Fresh closed the location, and a 40,981-square-foot box sat there long enough that guessing what would replace it became its own small neighborhood pastime.

As reported by the Korea Daily, the answer turned out to be more specific than anyone guessed. Mega Mart, a Korean retail chain backed by the Nongshim Group and operating for 50 years overseas, is opening its first Southern California store in that exact building. It's targeting a late October debut, which makes it one of five commercial spaces across La Habra that have changed hands in a single calendar year, each in its own way, none of them the story you'd expect from a quiet stretch of Imperial Highway.

What Nongshim Is Building at 1610 West Imperial

Mega Mart isn't quietly restocking the old Amazon Fresh shelves. The store is being built as what the company calls a "Next-Gen K-Market," and the plans include a fresh sushi counter stocked with Pacific Bluefin tuna and Jeju flatfish, 48 varieties of sushi and sashimi, and live tuna dismantling demonstrations at the counter. It's the chain's sixth location in the United States and its first foothold in Southern California, which is notable on its own. Mega Mart has operated in other U.S. markets for years without ever opening here.

The company has been candid that the timeline isn't locked down yet. Mega Mart manager Egon Lee put it plainly in a statement to the Korea Daily:

"While our exact opening date isn't finalized, we are targeting late October."

Company officials also said the choice of La Habra over other Orange County cities came down to the area's Korean American population and its access to neighboring communities like La Mirada, Brea, Fullerton, and Buena Park. That's a five-city radius built into a single site selection decision, and it says something about how the company is thinking about this store: not as a neighborhood grocery run, but as a regional draw.

Four Other Storefronts Turned Over This Year

The grocery store is the biggest single project, but it's not the only one. Look at what else has moved into La Habra addresses over roughly the same stretch of 2026:

• ROL Hand Roll Bar, 1202 S. Idaho St. Kei Concepts, the Huntington Beach restaurant group behind brands like VOX Kitchen and SUP Noodle Bar, opened its third ROL location here on August 4. The space seats 32 around a hand roll counter, in the former home of a Round Table Pizza inside the Imperial Promenade.
• La Famosa Taqueria, 634 E. Whittier Blvd. The La Habra Area Chamber of Commerce held a ribbon cutting for the new taqueria on June 6, a straightforward addition to the Whittier Boulevard strip.
• La Guapa Taqueria Bar, 1351 S. Beach Blvd. This one replaced Ricardo's El Ranchito, which had closed in the Beach Commerce Center. Owner Minami Chun told What Now Orange County the concept was aiming for a July debut, sitting between a State Farm office and Yedang Korean Restaurant.
• 7-Eleven, 750 N. Harbor Blvd. The convenience store chain added a new location here, on a schedule that had it opening in late August.

None of these are large projects individually. A hand roll counter, a taqueria, a convenience store. But strung together, they add up to five different commercial spaces changing hands across five different streets in less than half a year.

Why Five Turnovers in One Year Reads Differently Than the Usual Churn

Retail turnover happens in every city every year. A restaurant closes, something else eventually takes the space, nobody outside the immediate block notices. What makes this year different in La Habra isn't the number of openings on its own. It's the shape of them.

These aren't five variations on the same trend. It's a regional grocery chain making its Southern California debut, a fast-growing Orange County restaurant group placing its third location, two unrelated taquerias opening independently of each other, and a national convenience chain adding a store. Four different categories of business, betting on four different theories about what this stretch of La Habra needs, all landing within the same year. That kind of variety is harder to explain away as coincidence. It reads like several separate companies independently concluding that La Habra's Imperial Highway and Beach Boulevard corridors were underserved, at the same time, without coordinating with each other.

The Mega Mart decision makes that reading harder to dismiss. A chain with five existing U.S. locations and zero presence in Southern California chose La Habra, specifically, for its regional debut, and said so on the record. That's a company doing its own site selection math and landing on this city over every other option in the county.

What It Actually Changes on a Tuesday Night

Set the bigger pattern aside for a second and think about what this actually means for a regular week. The old routine on Imperial Highway didn't include a grocery store with a live sushi counter and a tuna dismantling show. It does now, or will by late October. A Tuesday dinner run has more on the table too: hand rolls made to order at ROL, a taco run split between La Famosa on Whittier and La Guapa on Beach, or a quick stop at the new 7-Eleven on Harbor for the stuff you forgot.

None of these are concepts on a long-range city plan. ROL and La Famosa are open, La Guapa and the Harbor Boulevard 7-Eleven were both scheduled to open this summer, and Mega Mart has a street address and a late October target that the company itself says isn't final. Each one has a named operator and a specific address, and each was a separate decision by a separate company.

If you want to see how the rest of La Habra's neighborhoods and housing options line up against this kind of commercial activity, the La Habra neighborhood guide has more on what's nearby.

New restaurants and a first-of-its-kind grocery store don't just change where you eat. They tend to show up later in conversations about why a particular block of a city started getting more attention. If you're curious how this year's openings might factor into what a La Habra home is worth right now, or you just want to talk through what's changing on your own street, Jacob Klimenko knows this stretch of Imperial Highway well enough to walk you through it.