Daddy Mac’s Down Home Dive

The sign over the bar is a guitar with a fork for its neck, tines up, Daddy Mac’s Down Home Dive lettered underneath. Most of the room agrees with the sign. A porch wraps the corner at Biltmore Avenue, string lights strung over rocking chairs a few steps above the sidewalk. Regulars claim the porch before they claim a table inside. Below it, a mural spells out Nana + Papa’s Pickles in red and yellow script, two grandparents stencilled onto the whitewashed brick. The Picketini follows the joke: Tito’s, pickle juice, sweet-and-spicy pickles pinned across the rim. Dave McFarland spent six years developing the idea while he still ran the Wild Wing Café in this room. He closed that restaurant in July 2021 and reopened as Daddy Mac’s that October, the menu rebuilt from his four grandparents’ recipes, the same ones that taught him to cook growing up. The Smokey Old Fashioned goes out with Bulleit 10-year over a syrup they smoke themselves. Daddy’s Caddy Margarita gets its Grand Marnier twice, shaken in once and floated again on top. Upstairs, a loft off a ladder behind the bar is home base for the local Cleveland Browns Backers chapter. Twenty-six screens and projectors carry every college and NFL game the kitchen can keep pace with, about as close as downtown gets to watching a game in somebody’s basement. Fridays hand the room to touring bands. Thursdays split it, karaoke below and football above. The bar just keeps pace.