Pine Hills, Properly: Many Cultures, One Very Good Table
One of Orlando's first suburbs grew into one of its most diverse communities — a local's guide to its food corridors, its landmark high school and its 159-acre park.
4 minute read
Start with the motto, because Pine Hills means it: “Many Cultures, One Bright Future.” That is the line adopted by the Pine Hills Neighborhood Improvement District, and a drive down Pine Hills Road or West Colonial Drive at lunchtime makes the case better than any brochure could. This is one of Orlando’s first suburbs — subdivisions laid out in the early 1950s along the newly built Pine Hills Road north of Colonial Drive — and still one of its largest, an unincorporated community west of downtown that grew up as a bedroom community for workers at Martin Marietta, now Lockheed Martin. What it grew into is something else entirely: one of the most ethnically diverse places in the whole metro, with large Haitian, Jamaican, Puerto Rican, Vietnamese, Korean and Cambodian communities among many others.
Our Pine Hills hub is honest about one thing up front: the magazine’s rankings have not reached this neighborhood yet. There is no ranked list to hide behind here. What Pine Hills has instead is a food corridor that rewards curiosity, a high school that reinvented what a public school can be, and a 159-acre county park that anchors the whole west side. This guide is how to do it well.
Read the neighborhood through its roads
Pine Hills runs on three arteries, and each one tells you something. West Colonial Drive (State Road 50) is the southern edge and the commercial spine — Caribbean markets, Jamaican bakeries and the paifang-fronted Orlando Chinatown plaza all sit along it. Pine Hills Road runs north–south through the middle, lined with Haitian kitchens, Caribbean takeaways and small plazas that serve the neighborhood first. Silver Star Road cuts across the north, where you will find Maynard Evans High School, more Haitian and Caribbean spots, and the residential heart of the community. Learn those three roads and you can navigate Pine Hills like a local. Our Orlando Top Spots Map will help you place them against the rest of the city.
Eat first — that is the correct order
The strongest reason to come to Pine Hills is lunch. On West Colonial, Caribbean Supercenter at 5111 W. Colonial Drive pairs a West Indian supermarket with a kitchen known for patties, oxtail stew, jerk chicken and curry chicken — shop for plantains and Scotch bonnets, then eat the cooking those ingredients were bought for. A few blocks west, Golden Krust serves Jamaican patties, jerk chicken, oxtail and curried goat in the bakery-and-grill format the chain built its name on. And at the corner of Colonial and Pine Hills Road, Orlando Chinatown — opened in 2002, with room for more than 60 Asian businesses behind a paifang unveiled in 2013 — holds Enson Market, Taiwanese buns at Sun Pearl Bakery, Vietnamese phở and Korean tofu within a single parking lot. We go deep on all of it in Where to Eat in Pine Hills Right Now and in our guide to the Haitian kitchens of Pine Hills.
The civic anchor on Silver Star
Every Orlando neighborhood has a school; Pine Hills has a landmark. Maynard Evans High School, on Silver Star Road at Pine Hills Road, was rebuilt with its main campus completed in 2012, and that same year it became Florida’s first Community Partnership School — a model, built with the University of Central Florida, Children’s Home Society of Florida, Orange County Public Schools and Orange Blossom Family Health, that wraps health care, family support and expanded learning around the school day. UCF later made Evans the first UCF-Certified Community Partnership School in the state, and the model has since spread across Florida. Trojan pride is not a slogan here; it is the neighborhood’s organizing principle, and we tell that story in full in our Evans High School profile.
The green anchor on Colonial
Just east of Pine Hills Road on Colonial Drive sits Barnett Park, the community’s signature green space: 159 acres around Lake Lawne — the county lists it as Lawne Lake — with a BMX track, disc golf, ball fields, a splash pad, a recreation center, a fishing pier and a boat ramp, right next door to the Central Florida Fairgrounds. The Pine Hills Trail, a multi-use path developed as part of Florida’s Coast-to-Coast Trail system, runs through the neighborhood from the Barnett Park area toward Clarcona-Ocoee Road, with a spur into the park itself. A Pine Hills Saturday writes itself: trail in the morning, park by midday, a patty run on the way home. See Barnett Park and the Pine Hills Trail for the full route.
How to visit respectfully
Pine Hills is a neighborhood first and a food destination second, and the kitchens here were built for the people who live around them. Go at lunch, order what the regulars order, be patient when a place is busy, and do not treat a working community like a safari. The reward for doing it right is some of the most distinctive eating in Orlando — griot and pâté kodé on Pine Hills Road, phở and hot pot under the paifang, oxtail on Colonial — in a suburb that has been quietly feeding this city, in many languages, for seventy years.
Orlando Citizen by email
The weekly edition, in your inbox
One email, every Saturday: the week’s edition of Orlando Citizen — the week’s stories, rankings and winners, gathered in one place. Free, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
Related Stories
Editor’s Picks
Spotted an error? Tell us — corrections · How we rank