It’s TV debate time at Manuel’s Tavern, an Atlanta landmark that has hosted Democratic heavyweights for six decades, and the patrons are glued to the screens as Georgia’s incumbent Senator Jon Ossoff trades barbs with his Republican challenger, Mike Collins, in the second and final debate before the November 3 midterms.
The Republican contender this time is more biting and sharp after his lacklustre performance in the first debate. But the crowd here appears unimpressed. Between sips of beer and bites of burgers, they follow the political slugfest impassively. This is a Democratic watering hole, and their candidate, Ossoff, is leading in the polls. They’re also familiar with their senator’s special talent for getting under the skin of his opponents. At Manuel’s Tavern, they appear to know how the show will unfold.
Collins starts the debate with an opening salvo. “This is a race between Georgia and Georgetown,” he declares, referring to the historic Washington DC neighbourhood of Georgetown in a dig at Ossoff’s much-reported, but never confirmed presidential ambitions.
Ossoff, looking unfazed, declares he intends to keep his opponent on the defensive for the next hour. “We’re going to pick up right where we left off last week and ask him questions he refused to answer,” says the 39-year-old Georgia senator and only Democrat in the chamber seeking re-election in a state US President Donald Trump won in the 2024 election.
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Nearly two years after Trump was elected to a second presidential term, Ossoff is at the centre of Democratic hopes to take back the White House in the 2028 presidential election. For many Trump critics, the opposition dream of regaining the executive reins and rolling back some of the current president’s most egregious policies rests on Ossoff, the fearless, articulate, handsome, young Democratic “Star of the South”.
At his final debate, Ossoff once again denied having presidential aspirations and reasserted his commitment to his Georgia constituency. But analysts are not willing to write off an Ossoff run for White House in the future. Georgia, they note, has previously given the country a Democratic president. Like Ossoff, he was a man not just of the South, but of America’s “Deep South”, the subregion of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina, that has a distinct historic and cultural identity.
Fifty years ago, when Jimmy Carter, a former Georgia senator and governor, was elected 39th president of the United States, he was hailed as a product of a changing "Deep South". Carter’s death at the ripe old age of 100 sparked an intense examination of his legacy on the country. It’s a heritage that lives on at Manuel’s Tavern, where the walls host a virtual museum of photographs, paintings, memorabilia and mementos to Carter, Georgia’s “son of the South”.
The tavern also marks the state’s changing political colours from a reliably “red” Republican stronghold to a “purple” swing state, and the critical role Atlanta – the “capital city of America’s South” – has played in some of the darkest and brightest chapters of US history.
Above all, Manuel’s Tavern tells the story of a family’s journey from a remote valley in Ottoman-run northern Lebanon to the copper mines of Tennessee, the growth of Atlanta city, and a generational rise up political ranks. In short, it’s the story of the American immigrant dream – and it lives on with the chatter of clients debating televised debates.
Talking politics, life and art by the window
On December 29, 2024, when the Carter family announced the death of the former president – born in October 1924 in Plains, Georgia – many Atlanta locals immediately began arriving at Manuel’s Tavern to have a pint and pay tribute to a beloved statesman.
It was a logical gathering spot, according to Brian Maloof, the owner and son of the bar’s namesake, Manuel Maloof. Back in 1970, when Carter decided to run for governor, he chose Manuel’s Tavern to launch his Georgia gubernatorial campaign.
Maloof recounts that over the years, Carter developed a close friendship with his father. “I met president Carter ... I don’t know … dozens of times. His wife, his daughter, his son, his brother, Billy. I met them all. They were our neighbours at the Carter Center,” he explains, referring to the headquarters of the former president’s NGO down the road from the bar. “And before there was the Carter Center, president Carter – or governor Carter at that time – and my father had a friendship. So, the Carters have been a big part of the tavern for a very long time.”
Steven Pitts, the tavern’s longtime general manager, points to a lineup of photographs of the former president near a window, including one of Carter and his wife, Rosalynn Carter, at the 1976 Democratic convention. “Jimmy Carter and Manuel used to sit at the front window all the time, talking about politics and life and art and everything else that you could think of. And so, in general, we just became a big political hotspot,” he explained.
From ‘bedroom Republican’ to Democratic stronghold
For Georgia’s Democrats, as well as national party figures visiting Atlanta, Manuel’s Tavern has been an essential stop on the campaign trail.
Pitts moves from room to room in the sprawling establishment to provide a guided tour of the vast collection of photographs and memorabilia adorning the walls. “Bill Clinton's been here a couple of times,” he says, pointing to framed photographs on a wood-panelled wall. “Hillary Clinton has been here a couple of times. We had Al Gore, he was Bill Clinton’s vice president, of course, and we have several other pictures as well … John Kerry, who was a senator who ran for president in 2004, was here, amongst others.”
The roster includes Barack Obama, who dropped in while he was president. “There he is, throwing darts,” Pitts says, pointing to a photograph. “Obama was waiting for an interview, and he asked for some darts to throw. I was not here, but apparently he was very good at darts. This is not a surprise,” he adds with a smile.
Established in 1956 on the corner of North Highland and North avenues in the Poncey-Highland district of eastern Atlanta, Manuel’s Tavern attracted notable Democratic politicians and supporters not just because it was the place to be. In the late 1970s, its founder, Manuel, also entered local politics and gained a reputation as a man with a plan and the drive to make it happen.
By the time he died in 2004, aged 80, Manuel Maloof had served for decades in various elected positions in DeKalb County, a primarily suburban district of the Atlanta metropolitan area. An obituary in the city’s leading daily, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, noted, “Mr Maloof played a central role in the transformation of DeKalb County from bedroom Republican suburb to the urbanised Democratic stronghold it is today”.
‘First Amazon’ of oxcart deliveries
For the Maloof family, it’s been a long journey from the Qadisha Valley in northern Lebanon, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, where Gibran Maloof – Manuel’s father and Brian’s grandfather – was born.
“My grandfather immigrated to the US around the end of World War I,” explains Maloof. “He had an oxcart, and he travelled from Atlanta to Copperhill, Tennessee, delivering mining supplies. He worked that route every month, and along the way, he took orders from people living in small towns. He was like your first Amazon – a much, much slower, early Amazon,” he adds with a laugh.
The family’s history of running taverns began with the Tip Top Billiard Parlor right by the gold-domed Georgia State Capitol building in downtown Atlanta, which Gibran purchased and ran for three decades. “When the Georgia state legislature was in session, we were the closest place for those state legislators to have a drink and to discuss things,” explains Maloof. “My grandfather listened to what they were talking about. He heard them talk about making Atlanta a city as prominent as Paris and London. They wanted Atlanta to be as important as New York and Chicago.”
So when the legislators discussed plans to build Lake Lanier, a man-made reservoir in northern Georgia to supply Atlanta, Gibran promptly bought land in the area, Maloof explains. The Tip Top Billiard Parlor was purchased right before Prohibition, which lasted from 1920 to 1933 in the US. “There were people who thought he was an ignorant immigrant who didn't know that Prohibition was coming. But he saw it as an opportunity to buy something very inexpensively,” the grandson recounts.
Looking to the future with an eye on the past
Gibran’s son, Manuel, was born in the US and served as an Army Air Forces mechanic during World War II. He was deployed to England, where he met his wife, Dolly. When he returned to Atlanta to start his own enterprise, Manuel modelled his eponymous tavern after the British wartime pubs.
The family’s history lives on at Manuel’s Tavern, Pitts explains, pointing to the imposing wooden bar, which was originally in Gibran’s Tip Top Billiard Parlor and survived a fire.
As a politician, Manuel displayed his oxcart-driving father’s enthusiasm for infrastructural development, including a pugnacious push to expand Atlanta’s metro transportation system.
After he died in 2004, Manuel’s ashes were placed in the tavern. Pitts points to a wooden cabinet high on the memorabilia-cluttered bar wall containing an urn with a pennant of the Lebanese flag. “We joke that he’s watching the cashier,” says the tavern’s loyal general manager with a grin.
The ashes in the cabinet, photographs of legends, signed books on the shelves imbue the tavern with a sense of historical heft for the clients – and of responsibility for the current owner.
“Every day that I go in there, I'm reminded of all the people that were there before me, and how important it is that I do the very best job I can to keep this going. I have never, ever really viewed myself as the owner. I'm more of the historical preservation manager,” Maloof says.
“It's definitely a double-edged sword,” he confesses. “It's pretty amazing to be part of something that has been in Atlanta for so long and has a big history with my grandfather, my father, my uncle. That's tremendous. But it's also very difficult because you have to keep up with modern times, but people don't want the timer to change very much. So, it's very tricky.”
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Just weeks before the country goes to the polls in the 2026 midterms, the patrons at Manuel’s Tavern have finished watching their Senate candidates debate their future in an establishment that celebrates the past.
Caleb Scott, a policy writer who also works at a data collection centre, declares Ossoff the winner of the latest debate and says he was particularly interested in the senator’s position on artificial intelligence (AI), especially the hot-button subject of data centres.
“The issue I personally found interesting was when Senator Ossoff talked about AI. I think that we do need to lead the world when it comes to actually governing AI,” he says. “Georgia could lead the nation considering how many data centres are being built here. People see it as a problem, but it's already here, and if we don't learn how to govern it now, while it's still in the elementary phases, then we're not going to know what to do when it becomes the behemoth that it could be in the years to come.”
While Scott has been working on an AI governance policy paper, he says that when it comes to watching candidate positions, there’s no place like Manuel’s Tavern to follow the proceedings. “I enjoy the camaraderie that they have here. I met Senator Ossoff years ago, before he became our senator, right here actually. It’s a pretty cool place to be.”