Around 8:15 on a Tuesday morning, Stephanie Shelton is doing four things at once. She’s ringing up a cortado, answering a question about a gluten-free scone, explaining to a new employee where the extra oat milk lives, and somehow also watching the door — not in an anxious way, more like a host who genuinely wants to see who shows up next. She’s co-owned Camino Bakery for over a decade, and the Trade Street location still runs on her attention the way old buildings run on load-bearing walls.
Camino opened in 2009 in what was then a stretch of downtown Winston-Salem that wasn’t quite anything yet. Trade and Fourth had ambition but not much foot traffic. The bakery arrived before the wave, which is either good timing or stubbornness depending on who you ask. Shelton would probably say stubbornness. The building itself is a converted 1920s storefront — high tin ceilings, brick walls that actually look like they’ve been there a while rather than installed to suggest authenticity. There’s a long communal table, a handful of smaller ones, and a patio that fills up fast when the weather cooperates, which in Winston-Salem means roughly eight months of the year.
The food is the kind of thing that sounds simple until you eat it. The ham and gruyère croissant is genuinely flaky in a way that makes you question every airport croissant you’ve ever accepted as sufficient. The egg sandwiches on house-made focaccia are heavy enough to feel like a meal, light enough that you don’t regret ordering one at 9 a.m. The soup rotates, and locals track it the way sports fans track injury reports. On a cold morning, the tomato bisque draws people who wouldn’t otherwise be awake yet.
Coffee comes from Counter Culture, which is a signal about priorities. The lattes are calibrated rather than sweet — if you want something that tastes like dessert, they’ll accommodate you, but the default is coffee that actually tastes like coffee. Pastry case turnover is fast; showing up after 11 on a Saturday and expecting a full spread is an exercise in optimism.
What makes Camino interesting as a place, rather than just a good bakery, is what it ended up meaning to the street around it. Restaurants came. A music venue. Gallery space. Whether Camino caused any of that or simply survived long enough to witness it is a causation-versus-correlation argument Shelton doesn’t seem particularly interested in having. She’s too busy running the place.
There’s a second location on Brookstown Avenue, near the old mill buildings that got converted into lofts sometime during the last decade’s renovation boom. It’s quieter, a little more neighborhood-y, good if you want to actually read something without competing with the Trade Street lunch crowd. Both locations close in the mid-afternoon, so don’t build your day around a 3 p.m. coffee run.
Expect to spend somewhere between eight and fourteen dollars depending on what you order. Cash works, cards work, the line moves. It is not the kind of place that makes you feel virtuous for being there, which is its own kind of virtue.
