Little Saigon Grew Up: Inside Mills 50’s Vietnamese Corridor
After 1975, Vietnamese families built a food district on Colonial Drive one storefront at a time. Fifty years on, Mills 50's Little Saigon holds Bib Gourmands, a landmark market and the deepest roots in Orlando dining.
3 minute read
Every food district has an origin story, but few can point to the exact decade, the exact intersection, and the exact families who built it. Mills 50 can. After 1975, Vietnamese refugee families resettling in Central Florida began opening restaurants, bakeries, groceries and jewelers along Colonial Drive around Mills Avenue, and the tired commercial strip they inherited slowly became Little Saigon — one of the largest and most concentrated Vietnamese communities in the Southeast. Fifty years on, that corridor is still the district’s anchor, its identity, and the reason the rest of Orlando drives here to eat.
Built by hand, one storefront at a time
The landmarks of that first generation are still standing. Dong-A Supermarket, open since 1986 and still family-run, stocks the herbs, sauces and pantry staples the corridor’s kitchens — and half the home cooks in Orlando — depend on. Pho 88, family owned and operated at 730 N Mills Avenue since August 2001, ladles phở, bún bò Huế and bún riêu in a dining room that has been voted among the city’s best phở more than once. These are not nostalgia acts. They are working businesses that outlasted the strip’s decline, its reinvention as an official Main Street district, and the arrival of the Michelin Guide.
Turnover is part of the story, too. Little Saigon, one of the corridor’s pioneering restaurants, served for nearly four decades before closing — the kind of run that tells you how deep the roots go. The space the community built did not empty out when a pioneer retired; the next generation was already cooking.
The second generation cooks differently — and just as well
Walk the corridor today and the through-line is evolution, not preservation. Z Asian Vietnamese Kitchen, on East Colonial Drive, pairs traditional Vietnamese cooking with a modern room and a full separate vegan menu — vegan phở and vegan bún bò Huế included — and has earned a Michelin Bib Gourmand for it. Sticky Rice, billed as Central Florida’s first Lao street-food eatery, stretches the corridor’s map a few blocks east with small plates built for sharing, grilled meats and papaya salad served the Lao way, with sticky rice eaten by hand. And in the former Tien Hung grocery at 1110 E Colonial Drive, Mills Market — our No. 1 food hall in Orlando — gathers Bánh Mì Boy, UniGirl and Zaru, all Michelin Bib Gourmand names, under the roof of the market that anchored the old neighborhood, with Tien Hung Jewelry still in its original spot inside.
How to eat the corridor properly
Do not pick one restaurant and call it done. The corridor rewards grazing: a bánh mì from a counter inside Mills Market, a bowl of phở at Pho 88, something grilled and sour and fiery at Sticky Rice, and a Vietnamese coffee wherever the line looks happiest. Our Mills 50 food crawl strings six stops into one evening; this corridor piece is the history underneath it. Park once near Mills and Colonial, walk, and let the hand-painted signs — some in Vietnamese first, English second — set the itinerary.
Bring a tote bag. The corridor is a working shopping district as much as a dining one — Dong-A and the smaller markets along Colonial stock the fresh herbs, rice noodles, sauces and imported snacks the restaurants cook with, and half the pleasure of a Saturday here is grocery shopping the way the neighborhood does, then eating lunch a block from where the ingredients on your list just came from. Jewelers, bakeries and travel agencies fill the plazas between the restaurants; this is infrastructure, not theming.
What makes Little Saigon matter beyond the food is that it was never a theme. Nobody designed an “ethnic dining district” for tourists; a community fed itself, then fed its neighbors, then fed a city. The Michelin stars and the national magazine covers arrived decades later, chasing something that was already there. Start with the map on our Orlando Top Spots Map, but understand: on this corridor, the map is the least interesting part. The history is the meal.
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