1. The Bookshop
City: Chapel Hill, NC
Category: Shopping
Address: 400 W. Franklin St.
Description: The Bookshop specializes in rare and used books, and has an inventory of more than 100,000 titles. Specialties include humanities, social sciences, foreign languages, and North Carolina and Southern history and literature. The shop has been in operation for more than 25 years, and has recently changed hands.
2. Internationalist Books
City: Chapel Hill, NC
Category: Shopping
Telephone: (919) 942-1740
Address: 405 W. Franklin St.
Description: Internationalist Books is dedicated to activist literature, independent and alternative publishers and hard-to-find titles. Founded in the 1980s as a source of information for the anti-apartheid movement, the store today serves as a meeting place for a number of progressive causes. A co-op owns Internationalist Books, and members volunteer their time working in the store.
3. 3 Cups
City: Chapel Hill, NC
Category: Shopping
Telephone: (919) 968-8993
Address: 227 S. Elliott Rd.
Description: This store sells wine, tea, coffee, and chocolate for consumers with discriminating palates who care about where their drinks come from. Wines are sourced from small estates, coffees come from small farmers, and the people who work at 3 Cups can tell you all about them. The shop also carries locally made cheeses and jams. The cafe serves foods from local restaurants and bakers and wine, tea, and coffee by the cup or glass. But don’t go in and rattle off an order for a grande latte with soy milk to go. No espresso drinks are offered, just French press coffee made while you wait.
4. A Southern Season
City: Chapel Hill, NC
Category: Shopping
Telephone: (919) 929-9466
Address: 201 S. Estes Dr.
Description: The Zabar’s of the South, A Southern Season is a 60,000-square-foot food and cooking store packed with cookware, cookbooks, cooking machines, spices, hard-to-find ingredients, a cheese and meat counter, a wine shop, and a demonstration kitchen. It is a mecca for foodies of all stripes, Southern and otherwise. The store hosts events featuring regional and national names in food and offers a full slate of cooking lessons that range from purveyors’ lectures on tea to instructional sessions on how to cook fish or make empanadas. Instructional wine tastings are held on Friday nights. Also on site is the Weathervane, a cafe where chefs make use of the store’s bounty of ingredients.
5. Norman Stockton
City: Chapel Hill, NC
Category: Shopping
Telephone: (919) 945-0800
Address: 107 Meadowmont Village Circle
Description: A nationally respected North Carolina men’s clothier and tailor that has been around since 1909, Norman Stockton carries labels including Canali, Burberry, Zanella, Robert Talbott, and Gitman. The store is known for its tailoring and top-notch customer service. Norman Stockton, which has a second location in Winston-Salem, is among the top 100 men’s clothing stores in the country, according to Esquire magazine.