Mary Mac's Tea Room Review

Mary Mac’s has served Southern food in Midtown Atlanta since 1945, one of the last of the city’s old “tea rooms” (a genteer-sounding name women’s-run restaurants used in an era when “restaurant” implied something rowdier). You still order by pencil on a paper ticket, the fried chicken and country-fried steak and squash casserole come with a basket of yeast rolls and cornbread, and the “pot likker” — the vitamin-rich broth left from cooking greens, served with cornbread to sop it — is a genuine old-South ritual. It’s warm, unhurried, and about as authentically Georgia as a plate gets.