Mary Mac's Tea Room

This guide to Mary Mac's Tea Room in Atlanta opens with the free bowl of pot likker and cracklin' cornbread every first-time guest is quietly handed before anyone takes an order. It traces the restaurant back to 1945, when a widow named Mary MacKenzie needed a way around the rule that women couldn't own restaurants in the South, and called hers a tea room instead, one of sixteen that opened under that same polite fiction. You'll hear about the owners who kept the tradition going, including Jimmy Carter's favorite dessert, still on the menu. Notice how the welcome arrives before you're even asked what you want.