Note: I was an invited guest of 5Church, but was not otherwise paid or compensated for writing this post. Thanks to 5Church and Lou Hammond Associates for inviting me!
We spent an all-too-brief 24 hours in Charleston last month, but we had a good reason. Originally, we’d planned to reunite with our family for a belated Christmas/New Year’s celebration. Then, just as everyone started heading down South, my youngest sister went into labor and delivered a healthy baby boy the day after Christmas. He was five weeks early, but so far he seems to have made up for his unexpected early arrival by being super adorable and chunking up pretty quickly. We ended up spending the majority of our holiday in Charlotte, North Carolina, getting to know the newest addition to our clan.
On the one evening we had in Charleston, my dad graciously agreed to watch the kids so that we could hit up 5Church, a new addition to the Market Street area downtown. Market Street, if you’ve never been to Charleston, is a hub of tourist activity. There’s an open air souvenir market and small food hall, and at nights the streets fill with college students and other 20-somethings looking for a rowdy good time at one of the many bars lining the street. For oldies like me who were a part of that scene oh, I don’t know, a decade or more ago, you might remember 5Church as being the old Mad River Brewing Company. Yep, that place. The place where you drank yards of beer and left your dignity behind. (Not that I’m proclaiming innocence at all, either).
