The Historic Georgia Restaurant That Has Served Both Beyoncé And The Dalai Lama

Pop quiz! What do Beyoncé, Hillary Clinton, and the Dalai Lama have in common? It may sound like the setup for a joke of questionable taste, but there's actually an answer: All three of them ate at Mary Mac's Tea Room in Atlanta, Georgia. They joined the likes of timeless legends like John Lewis, James Brown, and Jimmy Carter. Although it's called a tea room, you'll find that the fare offered at Mary Mac's is a good deal heartier than the fancy small bites you'd get at, say, New York's most expensive tea service. Mary Mac's is a restaurant, and a great one at that.

Why is it called a tea room, then? When it first opened in 1945, it was seen as unbecoming of a woman to run a restaurant, even as many women, including one Mary MacKenzie, sought to establish a degree of independence at the tail end of World War II. With that said, however, tea rooms were seen as an acceptable feminine vocation, so a number of tea rooms (or restaurants claiming to be tea rooms) sprouted up in Atlanta during the postwar days — although, alas, only Mary Mac's has stuck around today.

MacKenzie handed the restuarant over to an employee, Margaret Lupo, in 1962, who proceeded to help turn the restaurant into the institution it is today. Among other things, she desegregated the restaurant. Today, 80 years after its opening, Mary Mac's is still going strong, surviving the pandemic as well as a partial roof collapse in 2024.

If you happen to find yourself in the same position as Hillary Clinton and the Dalai Lama (who among us hasn't, really?), what might you order at Mary Mac's? For the most part, the menu is pure Southern comfort food. There are no fewer than a half-dozen different kinds of fried chicken, whether they're in four pieces, in tender form, in wing form, or smothered in gravy. There are some other stick-to-your-ribs classics, too, like meatloaf and chicken and dumplings. There's catfish, as well as some shrimp and grits. And of course, there's plenty of iced tea to go around — what, you didn't think the "tea room" name was completely for show, did you?

If you stick around for dessert, you can even try a dish named after one of the restaurant's most famous guests. The late Jimmy Carter lent his name to the Carter Custard, a peanut-based custard perfect for everyone's favorite former goober farmer. And as a testament to how long Mary Mac's has been around, it should be known that the dish was introduced not during his presidential campaign, but during his gubernatorial run in the early 1970s. It may not have hosted pirates like the Pirate House, or housed countless drawings of Abraham Lincoln like Abe's on Lincoln, but Mary Mac's is another Georgia institution built to last.