Where to Eat in Union Park: The Colonial Corridor Feeds It
No ranked restaurants sit inside Union Park and none are invented here. The community eats on East Colonial Drive — its own working strip — and at East Orlando's ranked tables, labelled as theirs.
1 minute read
The standing disclosure of this magazine’s zero-ranked hubs: the Top Businesses rankings have not scored a business inside Union Park yet. What Union Park has is a corridor — East Colonial Drive, SR-50, running through the community’s middle — and the corridor does the feeding, in the unglamorous, useful way of east Orlando’s working strips.
The pattern on the ground
Union Park’s food geography is the Colonial strip itself: the plazas at the Dean Road and Rouse Road junctions, the supermarkets and counters and family restaurants that serve 10,452 residents and the through-traffic alike. This is everyday eating infrastructure — the place the neighbourhood actually feeds itself — and the magazine describes it as a pattern rather than naming venues it has not verified, which is the honesty this hub runs on everywhere.
Where the ranked tables are
For a scored meal, Union Park looks to its neighbours: East Orlando, the UCF and Alafaya corridor a few miles north and east, holds the area’s ranked bench — the pizza, coffee and everyday dining the magazine has scored there appear on this hub as Ranked Nearby, home area named, and on the Top Spots Map. Waterford Lakes Town Center, southeast of Blanchard Park, is the dinner-and-a-movie run. When the rankings work the Colonial corridor, this page changes; until then, the corridor stands as the true state of the table.
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