Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 02:04:00

The room above the restaurant has been Atlanta's proving ground since 1993. Smith's Olde Bar occupies 10,500 square feet of the historic Morningside strip at 1578 Piedmont Avenue NE - a 1920s Taylor-family property billed as Atlanta's first strip mall - where Dan Nolen and Mike Reeves opened the venue after years running the Cotton Club and the Point. Two stages split the work: the roughly 300-capacity Music Room upstairs, renamed the Mike Reeves Music Room for the late co-founder, and the 100-capacity Atlanta Room on the ground floor for locals, songwriter rounds and early-career bills. The wall of fame writes itself - David Bowie, John Mayer, Kings of Leon, Chris Stapleton, Luke Combs, Zac Brown Band, Jason Isbell, Janelle Monae and Train all played the room before the big rooms - and the venue still promotes over 500 ticketed concerts a year across every genre. Downstairs operates as a full-service restaurant and bar with a game room and patio, the revenue backbone that has kept an independent venue alive through three decades of Atlanta real-estate pressure. That pressure peaked in 2015 when the property went to auction with a disputed vacate notice hanging over the bar; the 2016 lease rescue by a local developer preserved what the music press had already declared an irreplaceable institution. Charlie Hendon joined as partner in 2016 for the current chapter, and the Piedmont Heights corner - five minutes from Piedmont Park and the BeltLine - keeps feeding the doors the mix of regulars and show crowds that defines a true neighbourhood venue. The booking operation doubles as a promoter school - staff alumni populate Atlanta's venue and festival offices - and the room's soundboard recordings have preserved early sets from half the Southern acts that later filled arenas, an informal archive the venue's thirty-year continuity made possible.