Ethel Mertz would have loved Mary Mac’s. Lucy Ricardo’s best friend wasn’t a gourmet, but she was a dedicated eater. She approached food with gusto, with relish, with enthusiasm. And that’s the way you should approach this shrine to Southern cookery, because the experience is akin to being invited to dinner in a gracious old home and waiting expectantly until the hostess—who also happens to be a consummate cook, worthy of being included in Paula Deen’s league—appears in the doorway to the dining room and announces with a flourish, “Supper’s on the table.”

Mary McKinsey opened Mary Mac’s in 1945, when enterprising women were opening restaurants—some out of necessity, being mothers widowed by war—all over Atlanta. Calling them tea rooms was a way of distinguishing their establishments from, say, greasy spoons, since the emphasis was on the kitchen: snapping fresh green beans by hand, shucking corn, baking old-fashioned desserts like banana pudding and peach cobbler. And it is this sense of dining in someone’s home that Mary Mac’s aims to replicate.

I approached Mary Mac’s after a heavy-duty day of Atlanta sightseeing—a one-two-three punch that covered the Fox Theatre backstage tour, the Georgia Aquarium and The World of Coca-Cola, in that order. Plus I was still working off an unexciting but filling fast-food lunch at The Varsity. But I happened to be in the neighborhood, it was 5:30 (ahh, then the restaurant shouldn’t be crowded) and I needed to cross it off my itinerary. Mary Mac’s it was.

The ambience is reminiscent of a dining room in a Southern home, or at least a genteel boarding house. French doors separate the different seating areas; there are wood chairs and tables spread with white linen tablecloths; walls are a muted olive green. As I suspected, the dinner rush had not yet materialized, so I was seated right away and my server, Star, soon appeared. The servers, while not quite looking like “Gone With the Wind” extras, do wear outfits veering in that direction, and in Star’s case it clashed a bit with her lip piercing and goth-inspired eye makeup. But no matter; it’s all about the ambience. 

It was at this point that I made, although unwittingly, my first faux pas. At each place setting there’s a card on which you tick off your menu choices, hand to the server and have it read back to you to verify what you’ve ordered. To tell you the truth I didn’t even notice the card when I sat down, but I did consult the menu. And it presents a very tempting range of choices that cover the Southern cooking spectrum, from fried green tomatoes to country fried steak and gravy to pork barbecue with Brunswick stew. Side dishes run the gamut from mac and cheese to fried okra to turnip greens to hoppin’ john (field peas and rice). And I haven’t even gotten to the desserts. This is not a menu for the faint-hearted.

Star shrugged off my unchecked card and took my order: baked chicken with cornbread dressing and gravy. It came with a choice of two sides; I selected green beans and black-eyed peas. Star walked off but soon returned with a cup of pot likker—the broth in which greens are cooked—and a few pieces of cornbread, explaining that it was a treat for first-time visitors. She told me to crumble the cornbread into the liquid, which I would have done anyway, but I guess it’s just the standard spiel. Now I’m definitely not a fan of greens or the liquid they’re cooked in, but I dutifully followed instructions. The broth had a strong taste somewhat diluted by the cornbread, but the cup was small and I was hungry. It disappeared quickly.

My food was on the table within 5 minutes. The chicken and dressing was inundated in creamy gravy that I knew would be tasty and also knew I would have to work off with an hour on the hotel treadmill or a jog around the Active Oval in Piedmont Park. The green beans looked long simmered rather than stir-fry crisp, but after all that’s Southern style. Meals come with a bread basket: one yeast roll (good, but oh those calories), crackling cornbread (two small corn muffins that were dense, chewy and not sweet) and a cinnamon roll (that was cloyingly sweet; it had too much of that cinnamon streusel crunch stuff). I devoured the yeast roll, polished off the muffins in two bites and finished the cinnamon roll. I asked for another bread basket but ended up taking the cinnamon roll with me; I ate it the next day but the intervening 24 hours steered it into stale territory.

The only bum note was dessert. Star pushed the desserts, emphasizing their homemade freshness and the fact that they were all “so awesome.” So at her urging I ordered the bread pudding. Big mistake. Bread mush was more like it; it was too soft and way too sweet, a caramel-infused overload. I only managed to finish it because the serving bowl it sat in was so small.

And the verdict? I literally waddled out the door, so I could not eat here regularly; it would be too hazardous to my health. But overall it’s worth an occasional indulgence.

Mary Mac’s Tea Room is at 224 Ponce de Leon Ave. N.E. (at Myrtle Street), within walking distance of the Fox Theatre.