Manuel's Tavern, the Poncey-Highland bar that has absorbed seven decades of Atlanta's reporters, campaign staffers, cops, students and off-shift plumbers, hit its 70th year in 2026 — and it is still open only because the city paid to keep it that way. Manuel Maloof opened the tavern in 1956. During the Covid-19 pandemic it came close to closing permanently. A friend of the bar launched a GoFundMe with a $75,000 goal. It finished at $187,000.
Maloof was a lifelong community-builder and a staunch Democrat who dabbled in office himself: elected to the DeKalb County Commission in 1974, later serving as county CEO. He built the tavern into the room where Atlanta's civic class actually talked to one another, and the campaign trail followed. Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama all stopped in to shake hands and have a drink. On big nights, customers still fill the tables inside and out to watch results come in and shout at the televisions.
The house rules are the point. There is no music, ever — just a couple of muted TVs, generally CNN and something with a scoreboard. Maloof wanted people talking to each other: friends, dates, bartenders, strangers. The walls carry vintage political photographs and a dust-coated wall of beer cans old enough to have pull tabs. Maloof's own ashes sit in an urn beneath a portrait of Franklin Roosevelt, and they are not the only ashes on the premises.
Smaller institutions accumulate too. The parking lot has spaces reserved for members of the clergy — the sign adds "Seriously." A cat named Archer, who technically lives in a house around the corner, has logged enough years in that lot to end up printed on the bar's T-shirts.
Maloof died in 2004. His son Brian runs the tavern now, having taken it through decades of highs and lows after his brother Tommy, who ran it before him, died in 2001. For the regulars who have made it their default room for hangover brunch, promotions, retirements, goodbyes and at least one wedding reception, the 2020 rescue reads less like charity than like a bill coming due in the right direction.
Original reporting: Atlanta Magazine (2026-08-07)