Tea Rooms of the Times

Maybe it’s the bitter cold or the recent images of Jimmy Carter from my long-ago past, but I’ve been feeling especially nostalgic for some dishes that, when I was a kid, you could only get in a particular kind of restaurant in my hometown of Atlanta.

The Frances Virginia Tea Room on Peachtree Street in Atlanta preceded Stratton’s Tea Room described here. Photo courtesy of Creative Commons

My mother never made me dress up for the occasion, but sometimes we would go to Stratton’s Tea Room, a “ladies lunch” place in Atlanta’s Buckhead section, near the governor’s mansion. Yes, they used cloth napkins and set out a single fresh-cut flower in a tiny vase at the center of every table. Stratton’s fare was light. Chicken salad, my mother’s favorite, was served as two perfect mounds dotted with celery and laid out on a crunchy lettuce leaf. Sometimes there might be a sherry-laced soup offered or cucumber and cream cheese sandwiches that came cut in quarters, the crust removed from a soft, white bread. Other menu items might be chilled deviled eggs, hot little ham biscuits, or cottage cheese on a pear half sprinkled with a few strands of grated cheddar and topped with a cherry. Also on the menu: chilled asparagus spears with lemon on the side or a frozen fruit cocktail. I always started with a tiny glass of tomato juice (a free appetizer with any meal), and we inevitably ordered dessert--delicate cups of egg custard dusted with nutmeg.

It was all so very 1960s, and Stratton’s customers were all so very white and female. Segregated restaurants were still the order of the day when I was in grade school in Atlanta, even in department stores where there was a (white) ladies lunch room and bakery that offered exotic pastries, such as Napoleons and eclairs that you could take home in stiff white paper boxes.

Rich’s Department Store had the best known tea room. It was called The Magnolia Room. By 1961, it was the site of a sit-in led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with local college students, who successfully convinced the store to begin desegregation. It was this same store where Georgia chef Nathalie Dupree opened a cooking school more than a decade later. Dupree passed away at her home in Raleigh four days after Jimmy Carter’s funeral this month.

Mary Mac’s Tea Room, another family favorite for lunch, was much bolder than Rich’s in menu and manners. Their amuse bouche was, and still is, pot likker—the spicy juice drained from a pot of collards, served at Mary Mac’s in a cup with a side of buttermilk cornbread with cracklins (fried pork skins folded in the batter.) Entrees there include a 24-hour brined fried chicken, pork chops, meatloaf, and turkey and dressing. Their top three sides are a hefty mac and cheese, collard greens, and sweet potato souffle. Mary Mac’s popular Tomato Pie is the one dish that perhaps better resonates with other tea room traditions. Peach cobbler, banana pudding, and coconut cake are among their many considerable desserts.

Mary Mac’s is now the last of the 16 mostly women-owned, post World War II tea rooms that were launched in Atlanta before I was born. The restaurant has kept the same menu through three owners, two white women—Mary MacKenzie (who founded it in 1945) and Margaret Kennon Lupo, who desegregated the restaurant when she took over in 1962 and enlarged the footprint to six dining rooms before retiring in 1998. Jimmy Carter ate there often as did many Atlanta luminaries and international visitors. At Mary Mac’s you still write your order on a small sheet of paper with a green pencil and give it to the server. You can keep the pencil as a souvenir.

Finally, after closing for a time and the challenges from COVID, a Morehouse College alumnus, Harold Martin Jr, who also has a JD from Yale and an MBA from Harvard, took over at Mary Mac’s. He is the son of Harold Martin Sr., a recent recipient of the North Carolina Award and Chancellor Emeritus of North Carolina A&T University.

So with all this hometown nostalgia going on, I recently visited what promised to be a new kind of tea room—one with an environmental theme. Named for South Carolina’s state amphibian (Ambystoma maculatum), The Spotted Salamander Café and Catering in the capital of Columbia is a place where chicken salad and deviled eggs are high art. Chef Jessica Shillato, a James Beard nominee, opened the place in 2008 and they occupy a modest historic house at 1531 Richland Street downtown.

Their moist chicken salad is studded with pecans and grapes, and the deviled eggs du jour are designed to intrigue, which they do. On our visit, we got the very last serving of the chef’s choice, topped with smoked, chipped salmon and everything-bagel-seasoning. Shillato loves to surprise with deviled eggs that host a range of toppings, including pesto, bacon, shrimp, Chinese noodles, olives, sweet and spicy pecans, you name it. The cafe reportedly sells 1,600 a month.

One of the many deviled egg dishes offered at The Spotted Salamander in Columbia, SC, Photo by Donna Campbell.

A recent lunch menu at The Spotted Salamander

These are some busy people having fun in both the kitchen and the dining room, where the menu is a chalk board that changes daily and is posted online barely before the lunch hour begins. We were especially wowed by the “Kung Pow Brussels,” (sprouts with a kick). Spotted Salamander is, at last, a new kind of tea room for our times.

Meanwhile, Mary Mac’s announced they’d be serving commemorative “Carter Custard” following President Carter’s funeral.Carter gave them his recipe, heavy with peanuts, many years ago.