150-year history of Atlanta’s influential food scene largely written by women
Since stepping forth from the ashes of the Civil War, the City of Atlanta has been egregiously underrated as a food town. Infrequently credited for its contributions to global cuisine (you’re welcome for the fried chicken sandwich, world) and often stereotyped by outsiders, Atlanta’s vibrant food and dining scene is a pleasant surprise for many new residents.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the story of food in Atlanta has traditionally been told by women — intrepid female writers who found national prominence in the male-dominated newspaper industry.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s modern food and dining section can trace its origin back to the “women’s pages” first published in the Atlanta Constitution in the 1880s. Since then, newspaper coverage of food, cooking and restaurants has largely been stewarded by talented, often brave, women who understood the importance of such “soft” news subjects.
In the first half of the 20th century, the Atlanta Constitution and Atlanta Journal minted nationally syndicated stars like Southern cooking expert Henrietta Dull, who wrote under the byline Mrs. S.R. Dull, and Celestine Sibley, beloved for the columns on Southern culture that she wrote over her 50-plus year career.
A succession of well-known, successful female food editors followed, from competitors Jean Thwaite and Grace Hartley to the women who joined forces thanks to the Journal-Constitution merger, Anne Byrn and Susan Puckett (who still freelances for this publication). Many held their influential positions for decades, and the AJC’s most recent food and dining editor, Ligaya Figueras, capped off another 10 years of female leadership when she retired in September.
After reviewing 150 years of food coverage, it’s clear that food systems, restaurants and bars have always been on the bleeding edge of history, even if reporting on them was relegated to the lifestyle section. The saloons on Decatur Street were the first target of the mob that began the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested at a sit-in protest at the Rich’s Department Store lunch counter in 1960. Restaurants became the primary public-health battleground at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
If newspapers are the first draft of history, the food world offers the first taste of history’s effects. And in retrospect, the soft news of the day — news that was traditionally reported by women — often carries the most cultural impact into the future.
Reconstruction and early restaurants
The Atlanta Constitution was founded in the aftermath of the Civil War, and reporting on restaurants and food in that era was sparse. Many articles were not credited to a specific writer.
But one of the Constitution’s earliest mentions of restaurants revealed a trend that continues to this day: curiosity about the dining scene in New York.
In just a couple of column inches, a June 1868 dispatch from a Boston Post reporter entitled “How New York Lives” described the social scene in the Big Apple with incredulity.
“The Parisian custom of hiring rooms and taking meals at the restaurants is rapidly growing in favor,” the uncredited columnist wrote. “Even the women are beginning to adopt it, and at some of the saloons above Houston Street, you may see women and girls sitting at the same table with men, and ordering their meals with the nonchalance of old habitués.”
Through the late 1800s, mentions of restaurants in the newspapers tended to be brief and limited to those that frequently bought advertising space.
Food coverage began to increase in the 1880s, when women’s pages were introduced in many newspapers. The Constitution was the first newspaper in the South to offer such a section in 1880 when it debuted a page called Society Salad.
In that era, Atlanta’s culinary crown jewel was the Kimball House, then considered the South’s grandest hotel, according to Akila McConnell’s “A Culinary History of Atlanta” (Arcadia Publishing, 2019). An article in the Constitution gushed about the amount and variety of foods in the Kimball House larders. The famous hotel’s legacy of hospitality is carried on by Decatur’s Kimball House restaurant, the AJC’s No. 5 best restaurant in the 2025 Atlanta 50.
Another force shaping Atlanta’s hospitality scene at the time was the temperance movement and the clash over alcohol, which gave rise to a beverage called Coca-Cola. In 1889, a local soda jerk told the Constitution, “Atlanta is the greatest soda water town in the south,” though he said Coca-Cola syrup had not gained much popularity outside of Atlanta and New Orleans.
During Reconstruction, both white and Black people flocked to Atlanta, which remained fiercely segregated. As the 19th century ended, about 40% of the city’s residents were Black, and a parallel economy of Black-owned businesses, many of them based in food services, served the Black middle class, according to “Culinary History.”
An 1896 Constitution article detailed the success of about two dozen Black businessmen under the headline, “From bondage to fortune.” The article described well-known grocer James Tate thusly: “Born a slave and thrown upon his own resources by emancipation, he has won his way into the business world step by step.”
Tate went on to establish Atlanta’s first elementary school for Black children, and he is buried in a prominent grave site in Oakland Cemetery.
Jim Crow and Prohibition
Aside from the Atlanta University dining hall, the saloons on Decatur Street were some of the only spaces in the city where races mixed, according to “Culinary History.” Home to nearly half the city’s saloons, Decatur Street was saddled with a reputation for crime and debauchery, a perception amplified by the businesses serving both Black and white customers.
“In the ‘dives’ everyone is welcome who has his or her nickel to spend,” said the writer of a 1902 Constitution article entitled “Down in the Dance Halls of Decatur Street.”
The concentration of saloons on Decatur Street made the area the target of a mob that perpetrated one of the city’s greatest atrocities: the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre.
The massacre, which left dozens of Black citizens dead, deepened segregation in Atlanta and led to the passing of much stricter Jim Crow laws. The violence was part of a pattern that reached across the nation, a series of events that led activists to like Atlanta’s W.E.B. DuBois to call for a national conference to address racial inequality. Out of that activist movement, the NAACP was founded.
Jim Crow, Prohibition and Pellagra
The events of 1906 inspired a wave of pre-Civil War nostalgia among Atlanta’s white citizens. The trend was highlighted by a dinner planned for President-elect William Taft in January 1909, for which Atlanta’s Chamber of Commerce requested 100 ‘possums to be served. The presidential ‘possum dinner created a stir far beyond the city, as noted in a Constitution article titled, “’Possum letters are still pouring in from six states.”
“Not only have people from six states been writing how to get ‘possums, but many have undertaken to give ‘valuable information’ about how to bake or barbecue the juicy marsupial,” the article said.
In the early 1900s, Atlanta faced an epidemic of pellagra, a horrific disease caused by a deficiency of niacin, or vitamin B3, according to “Culinary History.” Similar to scurvy, the cure for pellagra was simple: eating a balanced diet that incorporated more vegetables.
The cure for pellagra was announced in Atlanta, which hosted a medical convention in 1916 where Dr. Joseph Goldberger described an experiment he conducted the year before in Mississippi. At a prison farm, he fed one group of prisoners a traditional diet of cornbread, molasses and pork fat, while another group ate a well-rounded diet of meat, fresh vegetables, milk and cornmeal. Though he could not explain why, Goldberger correctly concluded that a balanced diet prevented pellagra. Goldberger’s obituary, published in the Constitution in 1929, described him as “leader in the campaign that conquered pellagra.”
The Roaring 20s and Atlanta’s first food writing star
Goldberger’s revelation changed nearly everyone’s eating habits, and the concept of a well-rounded diet gained popularity around the same time the U.S. entered World War I. The federal government encouraged Americans to grow victory gardens and learn how to can and preserve fresh produce.
The effort to grow and eat more fresh produce led the Atlanta Woman’s Club to set up an open-air farmer’s market. The market was a success and it also began holding seminars to educate growers about raising produce. In 1924, the Atlanta Woman’s Club built the Municipal Market which still stands today, now operating as a food hall. A Constitution headline blared across the top of a Sunday edition page in April 1924, “Municipal market will be opened in Atlanta this week.”
The 1920s and 30s also saw the advent of Atlanta’s first food writing star: Henrietta Stanley Dull, who published recipes and cooking tips under the byline Mrs. S.R. Dull. In 1920, the Journal began publishing a Sunday magazine supplement called “The Cooking Department” written by Dull; its first issue said she was “recognized as the best authority in Atlanta on cooking.” In 1928, Dull published the landmark cookbook “Southern Cooking,” which can still be purchased today from Georgia University Press. A popular, syndicated columnist, she wrote for the Journal until she was 84, and died at the age of 100 in 1964.
The same year Dull published “Southern Cooking,” a young entrepreneur and former football player named Frank Gordy bought a sandwich shop called Yellow Jacket Inn near Georgia Tech’s campus; he later renamed it The Varsity with an eye toward opening a second location in Athens.
Post-WWII rise of restaurants
Many of Atlanta’s most widely known restaurants and chains were founded in the prosperous years after World War II, such as the Varsity, Mary Mac’s Tea Room, Waffle House and Chick-fil-A, which was founded in 1946 as the Dwarf Grill in Hapeville.
Though the post-war economic boom fueled growth in the restaurant industry, restaurants themselves received little direct coverage in the newspapers and were mostly relegated to classified ads. Frequent advertisers were often featured in list formats; a page out of a 1969 issue of the Journal had a section labeled “In Atlanta, where to eat, and how to get there,” which listed Squires Steak House. The list is directly next to a large ad for Squires Steak House.
But Southern culture and eating habits were detailed elsewhere in the newspapers. A 1955 column by Celestine Sibley, already an award-winning journalist for the Journal, called “Never mind grit in the deviled eggs,” painted a bucolic scene of an unspecified, but apparently popular, summer picnic spot.
In 1945, agricultural columnist Channing Cope published a piece exhorting readers to be more open-minded about cooking and food. Titled “Learn to appreciate a variety of foods,” Cope’s column touched on people’s preferences for biscuits, greens, gravy and mullet heads. “The lucky person is the one who can eat in any language,” he wrote.
The Journal was also home to Grace Hartley, the influential food editor who took over from Henrietta Dull. Hartley made TV appearances and ran a cooking school on behalf of the Journal; a 1950 ad for one of her recipe contests touted her status as “nationally known.”
Affectionately called Miss Grace by many, Hartley founded the National Food Editors Conference in 1942, an organization that would become the Association of Food Journalists. She worked at the Journal from 1937-1970, according to a University of Georgia publication.
At the center of the Civil Rights Movement
Restaurants and lunch counters became a major focal point of the Civil Rights Movement when activists began conducting widespread sit-ins as a form of nonviolent protest. On Oct. 19, 1960, the Journal covered coordinated sit-ins at eight different lunch counters that led to the arrests of eight activists — including Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who was taken into custody at Rich’s Department Store.
The sit-in protests were extensively covered in the newspapers — the article detailing King’s arrest was on the front page of the Journal the same evening as the incident, and a note on the news story listed 11 reporters assigned to cover sit-in activity.
A Journal article later the same year trumpeted the success of another department store, Davison’s, which shut down its tea room after sit-in protests (including the Oct. 19 protest that led to King’s arrest). Under the headline “Davison’s sit-in tea room booms as giftware center,” the article described how the former restaurant space had been successfully transformed to retail.
Black-owned restaurants often served as meeting places for the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, including restaurants still in operation today like Paschal’s and Busy Bee Café, both of which opened in 1947. Constitution reporter Sam Hopkins wrote a glowing profile of Paschal’s in 1968, extolling the success of owners and brothers James and Robert Paschal (albeit, in the dated language of the time).
“The thing that makes Paschal’s unique in Atlanta — and probably in most of the South — is that Negroes and whites were always welcome from the time it opened, even back when racial discrimination was at its worst,” Hopkins wrote.
Dawn of International Cuisine
In the 1960s, the Constitution hired Jean Thwaite as its food editor. She focused on cooking and developed a strong rapport with readers, according to a 1990 article about her retirement, written by her successor, Susan Puckett.
“For nearly 25 years she has been the food section’s answer to Dear Abby — answering readers’ cooking questions and fulfilling requests for long-lost recipes,” Puckett wrote.
At the Journal, Anne Byrn was hired straight out of UGA to succeed Hartley. Though she described herself as a decent cook with a double-major in home economics and journalism, Byrn did not realize what big shoes she had to fill, she told the AJC. Born and raised in Nashville, where she now lives, she was not familiar with Hartley’s near-legendary reputation. Looking back, Byrn said her lack of awareness likely allowed her to make the food section her own — something Puckett noticed before the Journal and Constitution merged.
“Anne is the one who really modernized the Journal’s food coverage,” Puckett told the AJC.
Byrn described the 1970s as an incredibly exciting time for food journalism in Atlanta. The Journal’s offices were just down the street from Rich’s, where Nathalie Dupree helmed a state-of-the-art cooking school that would become legendary in its own right. Byrn said she quickly befriended Dupree, who invited her to cooking demonstrations held by the first celebrity chefs. Thanks to Dupree and Rich’s, Byrn was able to interview luminaries like Julia Child, James Beard, Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse. It was Byrn who convinced the Journal to build a test kitchen in the early 1980s at the newspaper’s longtime office at 72 Marietta St., now home to the city’s Department of Watershed Management.
The 1970s also saw Atlanta become more connected to the rest of the world, thanks to advances in aviation and the city’s already-busy airport. The popularization of the jet engine brought daily international flights to Atlanta, and non-stop service to and from Europe inspired reader interest in foreign food. Before those international routes were added, Atlanta was a big Southern town, Byrn said; after planes began arriving from Europe, Atlanta became a truly global city.
That global connectedness would be further bolstered in 1990 when Atlanta shockingly won its bid for the 1996 Olympic Games. In preparing for the Olympics, Atlanta residents considered how to best host tourists from around the world and confronted the idea that the eyes from every corner of the globe would be turned upon them.
The ‘Fat ’90s’
Byrn loved to publish cooking columns and correspond with readers, but she did not like reviewing restaurants, she said. In that era, Journal and Constitution restaurant reviews tended to be more frequent and less detailed, often undertaken by a group of reporters rather than one or two dedicated critics. Byrn said it was difficult to contextualize restaurants with various service styles and price points, and she disliked the idea that her critical words could affect their business.
By the 1990s, restaurant criticism had become standard at most large newspapers. The AJC’s dining critic was Elliott Mackle, who dissected restaurants with an acerbic wit. Puckett called the decade the “Fat ’90s” because the newspaper industry was booming and the Journal and Constitution had officially merged, lifting their circulation numbers enough to compete on the same playing field as national publications like The New York Times and Washington Post. Ironically, recipes of the time became increasingly focused on reducing fat and calories.
After Mackle left to pursue fiction writing, the AJC hired John Kessler. Puckett described Kessler as “far and away the most influential dining critic” to hold the position.
Kessler, along with other talented writers like Kristin Eddy, Jim Auchmutey, Michael Skube and Elizabeth Lee, racked up plaudits for the AJC in the late-1990s and early-2000s, including media awards from the James Beard Foundation and the now-defunct Association of Food Journalists.
Rise of the internet and challenge of COVID
As the internet transformed the media landscape after the turn of the century, new online services began providing information similar to the AJC’s food and dining section — without a subscription. Websites like Yelp promised restaurant reviews, while All Recipes contained a seemingly infinite cooking collection. The Fat ’90s were over and newspapers across the globe grappled with dropping circulations and tough decisions about how to handle the new landscape.
In the mid-2000s, Kessler stepped back from restaurant reviews but continued to write about food with his trademark humor and grace. Meridith Ford, a former pastry chef, took over the role for about five years, but Kessler ultimately returned to the position of critic in 2010. Many chefs still currently active, like Kevin Gillespie of Gunshow and Nadair, and Anne Quatrano of Bacchanalia, shared kind words about Kessler in a 2015 article about his departure.
The AJC found its next food and dining editor in St. Louis, where Ligaya Figueras was executive editor of Sauce magazine. When she and her family relocated to Atlanta in 2015, the newspaper industry was experiencing seismic upheaval. Cable news and social media fueled a 24-hour news cycle that outpaced printed publications. Circulations dwindled, uncertainty reined and purse strings tightened. In this challenging environment, Figueras guided the AJC’s food coverage with a unique voice, dedicated journalism and a commitment to cooking content.
“Ligaya will go down in history,” Puckett told the AJC. “Keeping both the food and cooking (coverage) going at the same time, as well as all the food news and the dining criticism. I don’t see how she did all that.”
Five years into Figueras’ tenure, the COVID pandemic brought the world to a standstill. Restaurants were among the first businesses to be deeply affected, and they became the front lines for the culture war around public health. Figueras acted quickly to suspend restaurant reviews and the AJC kept a running list of restaurants that had shut down, switched to takeout or remained open. Figueras pivoted the AJC’s coverage to support restaurants rather than challenge them, highlighting the stories of restaurateurs and their employees, and sharing the innovative ways they endured the pandemic.
Though we still see the effects of the pandemic, Figueras stabilized the food and dining section before her departure earlier this year, returning the AJC’s coverage to a mix of news, recipes and restaurant criticism. She also kept alive the lineage of women whose strong voices shaped the way readers in Atlanta and beyond cooked and ate.
With the AJC ending its print edition on the last day of 2025, more change is certainly on the horizon. It’s easy to mourn the printed newspaper, but the AJC’s history won’t disappear when the printing presses shut down. Many of the promises made by the early internet have turned out to be fool’s gold. Online review websites are clogged with fake ratings; cooking websites are full of untested, poorly written recipes; AI slop has polluted nearly every facet of social media. We’re entering an era when trusted voices are rarer and more valuable than ever, and no food-focused media outlet in Atlanta can draw upon a deeper well of experience.
About the Author
Henri Hollis is a reporter and restaurant critic for the Food & Dining team. Formerly a freelance writer and photographer with a focus on food and restaurants, he joined the AJC full-time in January 2021, first covering breaking news. He is a lifelong Atlantan and a graduate of Georgia Tech.
