Taco Mac is the bar that taught Atlanta what a beer list could be, and you can grade the whole chain from its worst seat: a Tuesday-night stool at the Cumberland location with a basket of wings and a draft you have never heard of. The wings hold up. The beer wall still does the heavy lifting. The name still makes no sense, and that is the point.
The origin is real and worth knowing. Two Buffalo natives, Greg Wakeham and Lou Chambers, stopped in Atlanta on the way to Florida in 1979, decided to stay, and opened a wing joint in Virginia-Highland with no money for both a kitchen and a new sign. They fixed the kitchen and kept the old Mexican-sounding name, per the brand's own company history. Forty-six years later that first room finally closed in May 2025, an event the Rough Draft Atlanta covered as the loss of a neighborhood institution.
What makes Taco Mac matter is the draft wall. The chain stacked the largest selection of microbrewed and imported beer in the South decades before the word "craft" entered a marketing deck, per Wikipedia. The Cumberland room runs north of 100 taps, and the staff treat the list as the menu, not the garnish.
The room
Cumberland is a big, loud, television-saturated box off Cobb Parkway, two minutes from Truist Park. There are more than 30 high-definition screens and no bad sightline to a game. It is not a place for a quiet conversation. It is a place to land before or after a Braves home stand and watch four other games while you wait on a table.
What to order
Order the original Buffalo wings, hot, split between bone-in and the fresh-never-frozen standard the kitchen built its name on. Pair them with whatever local Georgia draft the bartender is pushing that week, because the rotating handles are where this place earns its rank. Then sign up for Brewniversity, the long-running beer rewards program that turns logged pints into bigger pours and, eventually, trips, per Taco Mac's own materials. Skip the frozen-margarita move; the tequila list is an afterthought next to the taps.
What regulars say
The pattern across Yelp and Google reviews of the Cumberland location is consistent: people come for wings and game day, praise the beer selection by name, and flag that service slows to a crawl when a Braves crowd or an SEC Saturday hits at once. The repeated advice is to sit at the bar rather than wait on a host stand when the place is slammed.
Who it is for, and which location to pick
Hours run roughly 11am to midnight on weeknights and Sunday, and to 1am Friday and Saturday, though the kitchen and bar flex with the Truist Park schedule. This is a bar for the wing-and-a-game crowd, for the beer hunter working a Brewniversity card, and for anyone who wants a guaranteed seat near a screen. If you came looking for a craft-cocktail program, this is not your room; aim that energy at the rest of Atlanta's sports bars or the broader Atlanta craft-beer scene instead.
A practical note on which Taco Mac to visit. The chain now runs roughly two dozen rooms across the Southeast, and the original Virginia-Highland and Midtown Atlanta spots have closed, per the same Rough Draft report. Cumberland (3101 Cobb Pkwy SE) and Perimeter are the reliable in-city picks. Use the Atlanta bar guide to plan the rest of the night, or check the sports bars near me hub if you are closer to another part of town.
Best time to go is a weekday early evening, before any game crowd arrives, when you can actually read the tap list and the bartender has a minute to point you at the good stuff. Get the wings, get a Georgia draft, and start the Brewniversity card you will pretend you do not care about by pint three.
Sources: Taco Mac (official) · Taco Mac Cumberland location page · Wikipedia · Rough Draft Atlanta · Yelp (n=586)
