Heaven Is a Place on Fifth Street

Yer Humble Host at the Kopper Kitchen in downtown Winston-Salem Friday morning.

You can pretty much tell just from the color of the booths that the place is pretty close to my idea of heaven. It’s one of those ancient eateries in a slightly run-down low-rise building on the periphery of downtown. Most of today’s planners and downtown boosters would want to raze the place and replace it with some sort of shiny, overplanned “mixed-use” complex (with loft condos, of course) because that would, by definition, be more “urban”, right?

Yeah. Right.