Growth comes for Orlando’s Chinatown hub
Red and yellow lanterns glowed over a busy shopping scene at 1st Oriental Supermarket in west Orlando last week as the Chinese New Year approached.
Nearby, another full-service Asian grocer, New Golden Sparkling Supermarket, also bustled as customers shopped for hard-to-find delicacies such as jellyfish or the fragrant durian fruit.
Central Florida’s Chinese population is booming, which is fueling the new Chinatown shopping center on Colonial Drive near Kirkman Road. New Chinese bakeries have opened, along with restaurants, grocers, discount stores, attorney offices, a bank and mail services. A handful of Vietnameseand Japanese-themed businesses are there, as well.
“Most of the Chinese I see coming here are coming from China, not other places in the United States,” said Paul Liau. “It’s a good place to live. The weather is good, the air is clean and it is affordable to live.”
Orlando’s Chinese community has grown 48 percent between 2011 and 2016, according to the latest figures available from the U.S. Census Bureau. The local Chinese population grew about 28 percent between 2006 and 2011.
Those who claim Chinese descent, 14,865 people, outnumber those of Vietnamese and Korea ancestry in Central Florida. It’s a small fraction of the region’s 2.44 million people, but leaders in the Asian-American community say more Chinese are being attracted to the area to invest and live.
Chinese residents aren’t necessarily living near the new Chinese shopping district, according to Census data, but it is a convenient gathering place for businesses and customers who live in Windermere, Dr. Phillips or Winter Garden, said Shally Wong, an editor at Orlando-based Asia Trend magazine.
“If you live near UCF like I do, you probably don’t want to drive that far, but there are a lot of people moving to Winter Garden and Horizon West,” she said.
Investors from China and elsewhere have been drawn to Orlando in recent years, particularly for the chance to buy real estate, or to immigrate to the United States through a business investment visa, said Andrew Jeng, president of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce of Central Florida. China has long been a source of visitors for Orlando’s theme parks, and Visit Orlando said in 2016 it was ramping up efforts to market to Chinese tourists.
“Real estate prices are much cheaper than California,” Jeng said. “And if you want to live here, it isn’t as condensed as big cities like New York. That’s a big deal if you are coming from somewhere with a lot of people like Hong Kong or Beijing.”
The Chinatown neighborhood is about 5.5 miles west of the 50-year-old Little Vietnam, or Mills 50, district along Colonial Drive east of downtown. Chinatown property manager Eleanor Wong said there are other Chinese and Asian grocery stores and restaurants in town, but none bunched so closely as on Orlando’s west side.
“First we had one grocery store here and then a restaurant,” said Wong. “That was the start we needed to get people here.”
Only 15 years ago Orlando Chinatown was a generic shopping center called Westside Crossing, with a Publix supermarket and Walmart store. It is surrounded by a stretch of other Caribbean restaurants and businesses.
After Westside Crossing’s anchor tenants moved out, the owner of a Chinese market in Philadelphia, Chinatown Development LLC, bought the center in 2006, with hopes of turning it into an Asian business hub. Asian restaurants there include Chef Wang’s, with Chinese food, and Japanese noodle house Sapporo Ramen.
More recent expansion in the past few years includes Tsan Wu’s new strip mall with Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants, as well as New York City-based Amerasia Bank, which caters to Asian customers.
“We want to attract people from all over the area,” said Wu, who heads the association of businesses at the Chinatown plaza. “We want more types of businesses and more types of food, not just for Asian people, but for everyone.”
The 40,000-square-foot New Golden Sparkling Supermarket expanded the district a block west when it opened in August under the ownership of New York-based investor Golden Sparkling LLC. And plans are being formulated for a third supermarket in a former Walmart building and a food hall or small Asian restaurant vendors. One of the investors in the Chinatown plaza, 1st Oriental Supermarket owner Wai Pang, is redeveloping the Walmart space and plans to start construction in 2019, Wong said.
Some of the grocery stores are importing unique ingredients from Asia. Wong said that creates an opportunity to draw the interest from young professionals who want to eat more adventurously.
“We don’t want to just cater to Chinese or Asians,” Wong said. “We have a Chinese gate here to tell everyone to come.”