Located inside the Culver Drive location of 99 Ranch Market in Irvine, Eat Up! is a food hall concept seemingly designed to compete with rival supermarket chain H Mart’s popular H Market Eatery. Originally launched in select New York and LA 99 Ranch stores, the Irvine version will be home to multiple Taiwanese franchises including a L’uxweet breakfast and tea shop, Fat Daddy (aka Pan Lao Dad) fried chicken, and Orange County’s first location of tea specialist Jellyology Tea (previously known and heavily hyped in LA as Hechalou) – as well as an oversized Korean katsu, udon, noodle, tteokbokki, and drink shop named Somethin’, all sharing around 50 chairs worth of communal seating and very limited trash cans. The store’s longstanding Hot Deli and BF Bakery & Café spaces remain intact immediately next to the seating area, serving everything from dim sum and BBQ meats to cakes, pastries, savory pancakes, and inexpensive drinks.
An unfinished space for LA-based dessert shop Coconut Jelly King is one of a couple of signs that Eat Up! may be able to accommodate more vendors in the future. That said, other businesses inside 99 Ranch have typically flown well under the radar, underscoring the need for proper promotion to help the initial slate of vendors survive. Despite its prime location, H Market Eatery has faced significant turnover since it debuted, so we’ll be interested to see how this shakes out.
