Walk south down Poplar Street past the Old Salem Visitor Center on a Wednesday afternoon and you'll likely catch chef de cuisine Peter Bedrosian building a fire to char Jimmy Nardello peppers, while bar manager Su Jin Johnson mixes an espresso martini a few feet away. This is Dale's Revision, the newest restaurant inside Salem Bottleworks, and it only opened this month. If you've been driving past this stretch of South Poplar for the past year and a half wondering why a single old factory kept adding restaurants one at a time instead of all at once, there's an actual answer, and it has less to do with construction delays than with how the whole operation is built to run.
A Century-Old Plant Waiting For A Second Act
The building itself explains part of the patience. It's a Coca-Cola bottling plant that shut down in 1980 and spent the next four decades mostly holding boxes for Old Salem. Local entrepreneur Jared Rogers, through his company Salem Bottling LLC, bought it in April 2022, took possession the following February, and secured historic landmark status for the site in November 2023. That designation isn't just a plaque. It comes with a property tax deferral of up to 50 percent, provided the ownership group preserves the building's historic bones, which is exactly the kind of financial detail that turns a slow, expensive adaptive-reuse project into a viable one instead of a money pit somebody eventually walks away from.
That single incentive is the quiet reason Bottleworks exists at all as a multi-tenant food destination rather than a single restaurant with nice brick walls. Preserving a hundred-year-old industrial building while carving it into four working kitchens is not fast, and it was never going to be.
Four Restaurants, One Supply Chain
Here's the part that most drive-by observers miss. Salem Bottleworks isn't four unrelated restaurants that happened to lease space in the same building. It's one operation, run by husband-and-wife team John and Lucia Bobby, who built the whole thing around a shared butcher shop and flour mill that feeds every concept on the property. That's the actual mechanism behind the staggered openings. You don't stand up a shared meat and flour supply chain and then bolt four restaurants onto it in a single weekend. You build it in order, prove each piece works, and let the next concept lean on what's already running.
The sequence tells the story:
- April 2025 — Bobby Boy Bakeshop, the Bobbys' original bakery, opened a second location inside the plant with a commercial kitchen and an all-glass chocolatier station.
- August 2025 — Grandpa Joe's Slaberia, a pizzeria with a mezzanine level, became the second concept to open.
- December 2025 — Noodle Ju'b, a compact noodle counter serving house-made noodles and broth, opened as the third piece.
- August 2026 — Dale's Revision, a small-plate fine-dining room, opened as the fourth and, for now, final concept.
Sixteen months, four restaurants, one kitchen infrastructure underneath all of it. John Bobby, who was nominated for a James Beard award for the original Bobby Boy Bakeshop, described his approach to Dale's Revision's menu in a way that applies to the whole project: it's about seasonality and availability, and the plan is to constantly revise the menu according to what's actually on hand. That's not a slogan. When your pizzeria, your noodle counter, and your fine-dining room all draw from the same butcher shop, what's available genuinely shapes what shows up on four different menus in four different rooms.
What's Still Missing
The build-out isn't finished, and knowing what's coming next matters if you're deciding when to make Bottleworks a regular stop rather than a one-time visit. A retail shop is still in the works. So is an upstairs event space designed to hold 125 people in the main room with room for another 46 on the balcony, useful to know if you're the type who gets asked to help plan a rehearsal dinner or a company party. The outdoor courtyard has room for two food trucks and is climate-controlled with fans in summer and heaters in winter, which in a Piedmont August is not a small detail. Full build-out is expected by late 2026, with the completed operation projected to employ more than 150 people once every piece is running.
In other words, the version of Bottleworks you can visit right now, four restaurants and a bakery, is not the finished product. It's the version that exists sixteen months into a project that's designed to keep growing through the end of the year.
How To Actually Go This Week
If you want to time a visit around something other than guesswork, Noodle Ju'b currently keeps posted hours of 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday, and plans to add beer, wine, liquor, and sake to what it pours. Dale's Revision, being brand new, is still the one to call ahead for rather than assume walk-in availability. Bobby Boy Bakeshop's second location has outdoor seating that stays usable across seasons thanks to that same climate control, which makes it a reasonable stop even on a sticky August afternoon.
The Rest Of Downtown's September
Bottleworks isn't the only reason downtown Winston-Salem is worth a second look this fall. A short drive north, the Downtown Arts District runs its First Friday Gallery Hop on September 5, from 7 to 10 p.m., along the 600 block of Trade Street and the 200 block of 6th Street, with local galleries, live music, food trucks, and dancing in the street. Two weeks later, on September 19, the Hispanic League's 34th annual Fiesta Festival takes over downtown with free admission, live music, folkloric dance, and food vendors, kicking off Hispanic Heritage Month. And on September 26, the Bookmarks Festival of Books returns as the largest annual book festival in the Carolinas, a free street festival that has previously brought James Patterson, Maya Angelou, John Grisham, and R.L. Stine to downtown Winston-Salem for a day of panels, signings, and family programming.
None of these events happen inside Bottleworks itself. But they land in the same handful of fall weekends, and together with a newly complete four-restaurant food hall a few minutes away, they say something specific about where downtown Winston-Salem's momentum is actually coming from. It isn't a scattering of unrelated openings. It's a small number of anchor investments, a rebuilt bottling plant here, an arts district calendar there, compounding on themselves year over year rather than resetting every season.
What This Actually Tells You
If you've lived in or around downtown Winston-Salem for a while, you've probably had the experience of driving past a half-finished storefront for months and assuming nothing is happening. Bottleworks is a useful corrective. The gap between openings wasn't stalled construction. It was four kitchens being built to share one supply chain, on a building whose preservation was worth the wait because of a tax incentive that rewarded patience. That's worth knowing the next time you see a slow-moving project in this part of town and wonder if it's actually going anywhere.
If you're weighing what it's like to actually live near this stretch of the city day to day, our Winston-Salem neighborhood guide has more on the pockets around downtown and Old Salem. And if you're a Triad native who likes tracking exactly this kind of local build-out (or you're simply curious what a place like this does to nearby home values over time), The Jordan Factor is always glad to talk it through. Let's connect.
