Daddy Mac’s Down Home Dive

A mural on the whitewashed brick reads Nana + Papa’s Pickles, a jar label in red and yellow flanked by two spray-stencil portraits standing guard over the joke. Dave McFarland spent six years developing that idea while running the Wild Wing Café at 161 Biltmore Avenue, then closed it in July 2021 and opened Daddy Mac’s Down Home Dive in the same downtown room that October, the menu rebuilt from his four grandparents’ recipes. The Picketini answers the mural: Tito’s, pickle juice, the sweet-and-spicy pickles pinned across the rim. Bloody Marys go out loaded the same way on the patio, olives and a cheese cube and a pickled banana pepper stacked on the pick. Most of the mules and margaritas clear under fifteen dollars, Espolón or Tito’s over a housemade syrup. The Smokey Old Fashioned breaks the pattern at twenty-two dollars, Bulleit 10-year over house-smoked syrup; so does Daddy’s Caddy Margarita, eighteen for a double pour of Grand Marnier. A flatscreen over the bar runs live ballgame odds under a ceiling of rusted tin tile — more sports book than dive. The Bar-B-Cue-Terie Board and the Mama’s Got Mac skillets anchor the kitchen, which keeps a shorter late-night menu going after the full one comes down. Live music fills the weekends. Order the Picketini with a smoked plate first — the kitchen is the reason this room exists, and the bar is there to keep pace with it.