Arlington police detective Mike Wilson had no idea when he initially bought Blue Mint Thai in 2023 that the business would grow into a brand spanning across the Arlington area.
As the restaurant, which originated in Mansfield, grew to multiple locations, Wilson found the opportunity to bring a brick-and-mortar location closer to where he works.
Blue Mint Thai & Asian Cuisine is just one new business set to pop up in the Urban Union district of downtown Arlington in the next year.
Since 2016, Fort Worth-based Street Realty has been redeveloping the area near Front and Division streets.
Many of the buildings that now host beloved restaurants and businesses are used in ways that are a far cry from when they were built.
Hurtado Barbecue is one such business, currently operating out of an old train station.
Owner Brandon Hurtado and his wife, Hannah, ran a food truck across the Dallas-Fort Worth area until settling in at Division Brewing in 2019. Hurtado’s smoked meats and sides have landed on numerous best barbecue lists in Texas.
A few months after parking in downtown Arlington, Brandon Hurtado received a call from Street Realty co-founder Ryan Dodson. He had a vision to transform the Urban Union part of downtown Arlington into a walkable economic hub.
For Hurtado, buying into Street Realty’s vision of the area seemed natural since he went to UT-Arlington.
A packed house at Hurtado Barbecue in the Urban Union in downtown Arlington Oct. 20, 2025. (Chris Moss | Arlington Report)
“It’s been a lot of things, and a restaurant has never been one of them,” Brandon Hurtado said of the restaurant’s current home. “We had a lot to do.”
The vision is what sold Wilson on a location under The Rambler Inn, a boutique hotel.
“Street Realty told me about all the concepts and I said absolutely,” Wilson said. “My police station is 300 yards from there, and I have investors and friends that are all going to be like, ‘Oh, that’s Mike’s restaurant, let’s go eat lunch there.’”
Developers want Urban Union to become a dense, walkable area that attracts businesses and visitors.
Maggie Campbell, the president and CEO of the Downtown Arlington Management Corporation, said the dream and the creative use of buildings has helped keep Arlington attractive to larger businesses looking for office space.
“What has been built here is infill and adaptive reuse, so you can find a place for an office that’s not on the 12th floor, but it’s on the third floor, and your employees can walk nearby and enjoy this great urban, walkable district,” Campbell said.
The Rambler Inn’s retail space, which opened in June 2025, has helped address a problem that downtown Arlington has had for years, Campbell said.
The Rambler Inn, a boutique-style hotel, sits in the Urban Union in downtown Arlington Oct. 20, 2025. (Chris Moss | Arlington Report)
“What we did not have was new space that was available to prospective new businesses,” Campbell said. “The ground-level space we generally had available was being adapted to new uses.”
Campbell said that new businesses have begun to flock to the new space.
“The addition of new buildings with small rental space was really meeting an unmet demand, a pent-up demand in this market,” Campbell said. “We’ve seen a flurry of small businesses that are trying to get a presence on the street.”
As the downtown area grows, Campbell says that her organization is looking for ways to help businesses capitalize on the city’s influx of visitors — especially during the World Cup in June 2026.
“We are a little more than a mile away from the entertainment district, and anytime anything major happens at those big venues, we see overflow traffic,” Campbell said. “We will benefit, definitely, from that activity.”
Wilson said he is aware of how that traffic will affect operations at Blue Mint Thai and that his company is already making preparations.
“We’re talking with potential staffing partners, because it’s going to be hard to hire 30 or 40 new people for an entry-level restaurant,” Wilson said. “We are in conversations, knowing that it’s going to be a tidal wave of influx.”
With a hope to initially open the store in the first quarter of 2026, Wilson said that settling in the Urban Union is an investment for the future.
“The impression of this is to try to bring the downtown Arlington area like a Victory Park,” Wilson said. “It’s very walkable and everyone’s there for the retail, dining and high-scale entertainment district. It’s clear the path we are on.”
Front Street runs through the Urban Union in downtown Arlington Oct. 20, 2025. (Chris Moss | Arlington Report)
Chris Moss is a reporting fellow for the Arlington Report. Contact him at chris.moss@fortworthreport.org.
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