The long-vacant Colonialtown Post Office building on North Mills Avenue could soon be reborn as a two-story Asian food hall, with ground-floor food stalls and professional offices upstairs replacing decades of mail slots and P.O. boxes. The proposal lands at 611 N. Mills Ave., a three-quarter-acre parcel where developers want to replace the existing 7,200-square-foot postal building with a 9,000-square-foot food hall.
According to the Orlando Business Journal, the project is being advanced by developers Patrick Dang and Thinh Nguyen, who purchased the site back in 2017 for $1.3 million. The pair originally hoped to redevelop the property when the postal lease ended in 2020, but COVID-19 delays and a five-year extension kept the post office running on the site through 2025.
Post Office Officially Closed Its Doors Last Year
The United States Postal Service temporarily suspended operations at the Colonialtown Post Office effective immediately on July 2, 2025, after its lease was not renewed, temporarily shifting retail and P.O. box services to the Herndon Post Office on Herndon Avenue, per USPS. The branch had served the Colonialtown area for several decades before the suspension cleared the way for redevelopment talk to resume in earnest.
Getting the project built still means clearing some regulatory hurdles. Preliminary planning filings submitted to the City of Orlando requested rezoning from office to restaurant use, a variance for reduced parking, and approval to sell alcohol within 1,000 feet of Hillcrest Elementary School, according to WFTV. The elementary school sits directly across Mills Avenue from the site, a detail that could shape how the alcohol variance is discussed at the city level.
A Doctor-Turned-Developer Behind the Plan
Dang is a physician listed at 5058 Conway Road, according to his WebMD profile. He partnered with fellow physician Thinh Nguyen on the real estate investment, a pairing that traces back to their 2017 purchase of the postal site.
Mills 50's Asian Community
Mills 50 is home to a thriving Asian community, with Asian restaurants and businesses in the area.
A recent addition to Greater Orlando's Asian dining scene was the August 2026 opening of Phase 2 at the H Mart food hall on West Colonial Drive. The expansion added six new stalls — among them bb.q Chicken and Sorimmara — to the food hall inside the nearly 197,000-square-foot store, as Hoodline previously reported.
The Mills Avenue proposal would bring a new use to the corridor. Whether city officials grant the requested zoning change, parking variance, and alcohol exception will determine if the old post office's second act gets underway.
