Diamond Jamboree Irvine Restaurants: What's Open, Suite by Suite

"Currently closed for renovations. Check back for the grand re-opening soon."

That's the plaza's own listing for Tim Ho Wan, the Hong Kong dim sum specialist known for baked pork buns, still posted on Diamond Jamboree's dining page. No reopening date is listed yet, so the note reads as an open-ended "soon."

Diamond Jamboree has a lot of tenants in a lot of suites, and a directory can only be updated so often. What follows is a status check on what the plaza's dining page lists at Alton Parkway and Jamboree Road this fall, with a few details worth knowing before you make the drive.

Tim Ho Wan's Listing

Tim Ho Wan occupies suite A-127-131, a prime storefront near the plaza's H Mart anchor. It's the kind of tenant a shopping center brags about, a globally recognized dim sum name with a built-in following. The plaza's listing continues to show the "closed for renovations" notice. The plaza has not posted a reopening date. If you've been waiting to introduce someone to the pork buns, the return date remains unclear.

Contrast that with Chubby Cattle, the all-you-can-eat wagyu yakiniku concept that's taken suite A-101. The plaza's own dining page lists it plainly: hours to be determined, phone number to be determined. The suite is already accounted for on the map, and the tenant's operating details haven't been posted yet.

Two restaurants, two different kinds of unfinished. One's an old favorite in limbo. One's a new arrival that hasn't fully arrived. This status check focuses on suite-level details and the information listed by the plaza.

Dun Huang and the Din Tai Fung Comparison

Walk past Tim Ho Wan's shuttered storefront and into suite A-117, and you'll find Dun Huang, a northwestern Chinese kitchen serving Lanzhou beef noodle soup and hand-pulled noodles alongside meat-filled bread and lamb dishes. It runs standard hours, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday and until 10 p.m. on weekends, no asterisk needed.

Locally, some diners compare it with Din Tai Fung, a shorthand that says more about what Orange County diners are looking for than it does about Dun Huang's menu. Din Tai Fung just opened its own Irvine Spectrum location this year, and the wait times there routinely stretch past an hour on weekends. Dun Huang has built its own reputation in a strip-mall suite two miles away, and it's an option for people who don't want to wait.

Meet Fresh's U.S. Flagship

The plaza describes its Meet Fresh location in suite A-105, known for taro balls, herbal jelly and tofu pudding, as the chain's flagship U.S. store.

It runs its normal hours, noon to 10 p.m. on weeknights and an hour earlier on weekends. If you've eaten there, you may have compared notes on which topping combination works best.

The Second Floor

Diamond Jamboree reads as a single-story food court from the street, but there's a second level most first-time visitors never find. Contender eSports operates gaming setups up there, open for sessions and occasional free-play days, tucked above the ground-floor restaurant row. It's the kind of tenant that doesn't show up in a food-focused search because it isn't food, and it doesn't show up in a shopping-center search because it isn't retail in the traditional sense.

Speaking of parking: the structure behind H Mart runs five levels and is the plaza's main relief valve, accessible from the McGaw entrance or directly off Alton Parkway. On Sundays outside of morning church hours, the adjacent church lot opens up as informal overflow. If you're trying to time a visit, weekday mornings and early afternoons are your best shot at an easy space. Weekend evenings are the plaza at its most crowded, structure included.

Here's a Quick Snapshot

That last line matters more than it looks. Pepper Lunch's Diamond Jamboree location was the brand's first U.S. opening, the kind of milestone that would anchor a press release for most chains. Here it's one line in a directory, sandwiched between hot pot and curry rice.

What's Actually Changing Next

None of this is static. Back in 2024, Irvine's Planning Commission approved a six-story parking structure with roughly 23,000 additional square feet of retail and restaurant space, set to face Alton Parkway with a two-story building near Millikan Avenue. City planning records show a pre-application for a second mixed-use phase logged in March 2026, still early in the review process with no construction timeline attached yet. Whatever comes of it, the pattern holds: expansion plans move slower than the tenants filling in around them. The plaza's physical footprint might take years to catch up to demand. Its restaurant lineup already has.

If you're headed to Diamond Jamboree this week, a quick call or a look at a restaurant's own page will confirm hours before you go. And if Dun Huang or Meet Fresh is already on your list, both are running regular hours.

If you're the kind of person who tracks which storefronts change hands and which suites sit empty a little too long, that instinct translates directly to reading a neighborhood's real estate market the same way. BAIKHOME keeps an eye on both, the food and the buildings around it, because that's what actually living in Irvine looks like day to day.