A new food hall with 10 international culinary restaurants is coming to UC San Diego’s Theatre District Living and Learning Neighborhood. Built to serve the university’s students and faculty, as well as the general public, STATION8 Public Market is scheduled to open next August near the La Jolla Playhouse.

STATION8 is one of three Southern California food hall concepts conceived by Tiger Hospitality Group, a restaurant collective made up of partners Berke Bakay, Eren Unur and Brett Johnson. They’re also behind the rebranding and reopening of the food hall in Little Italy this fall, and a third is planned at the Miramar Theatre complex in San Clemente.

STATION8 will occupy a two-story, 20,000-square-foot ground-floor space on the district’s main square. It will sit across the plaza from Dora Ristorante, a coastal Italian restaurant owned by Chef Accursio Lota and his wife and business partner, Corinne Goria, of La Jolla. Dora is set to open in November.

According to Tiger Hospitality, STATION8 is among the first on-campus food halls in the United States that will feature locally-based restaurant companies, rather than chain outlets.

The two-story project will feature two bars and 10 globally-inspired booths on the 12,287-square-foot bottom floor. It will include seating for 312, including 34 seats on the 2,643-square-foot patio. The 5,122-square-foot mezzanine foor will house a different concept that will be announced at a later date.

.Construction fences surround the STATION8 Public Market project in UC San Diego’s Theatre District Living and Learning Neighborhood. It will open in Aug. 2026. (Pam Kragen – U-T)UCSD’s new Theatre District Living and Learning Neighborhood occupies the southwest corner of the UCSD campus at North Torrey Pines Road and Revelle College Drive. The mixed-use project includes housing for 2,000 students, classrooms, offices, a conference center, restaurants and an underground parking garage.

The district was created to serve as a welcoming public gateway to the campus, particularly for the more than 100,000 people who attend La Jolla Playhouse shows each year. Owners of the district’s anchor restaurant, Dora, plan to work closely with Playhouse staff to create themed pre-show, prix-fixe dinners for each of its season productions.

STATION8 is being designed by BASILE Studio, a San Diego architecture firm whose other projects include the restaurants Born & Raised in Little Italy, Raised by Wolves in Mission Hills and soon-to-open RoseAcre restaurant in La Jolla.

Tiger Hospitality’s partners met at the Windmill Food Hall in Carlsbad, where Bakay was involved in operations and Unur was a vendor. Besides its food hall projects, Tiger Hospitality has created the restaurant concepts Lobster Lab, Cosmos Burger and La Vida.

For construction updates, visit instagram.com/station8publicmarket.

Originally Published: October 20, 2025 at 10:18 AM PDT