Atlanta’s landscape is constantly changing, and our city has a reputation for embracing new development. At a time when we often hear about older taverns shuddering their doors, the new “City Lights” segment “Cheers!” celebrates the bars that have beaten the odds and survived for decades.
On this edition of “Cheers!,” an iconic watering hole gets the spotlight: Johnny’s Hideaway on Roswell Rd., successfully serving up dancing, dining, and cocktails for the last 43 years. The retro nightclub has long outlasted many a Buckhead establishment, and the club’s roots are still represented with its current owner Chris D’Auria, who joined “City Lights” senior producer Kim Drobes via Zoom to talk about the Hideaway’s impressive longevity and classic vibes.
Interview highlights:
How Chris D’Auria continues his dad’s Hideaway legacy:
“Johnny Esposito had two partners that opened in 1979, and the three of them didn’t get along, and so my father became one of Johnny’s partners in ’81, and ’98 he retired,” recounted D’Auria.” I bought out my father almost 15 years now.”
He went on, “I graduated college, and I wanted to take a year off before I continued with my education, and my father said, ‘That’s a terrible idea,’ and I said, ‘Well, I want to do it.’ So I went to work at a bar… called The Spot, where the Fish Market is on Pharr Rd., and I worked there, and I liked it. And so then I went to work at American Pie, and I was general manager, and then [my father] tried to convince me to come to Johnny’s Hideaway, and I told him, ‘Absolutely not.’ But you know, they say blood is thicker than water. So he talked me into it. And so I came to the Hideaway in ’97 and been there since.”
A historic, retro bar now attracting a younger crowd:
“You’re walking into a set from the ’70s. Everything’s red; everything’s brown wood,” said D’Auria. “There’s two bars both to the left of the club, the front bar; there’s 26 red bar seats that are in front of a wood bar that has a red, carpeted bar rail on it… The carpet’s red. If you don’t want to sit at the bar, there’s tables on the front part of the building. Almost half of them have Tiffany lamps from the ’70s that are over each table… Then you get to the dance floor, which is an 18×20 parquet dance floor.”
“Two big events that really changed the trajectory of the Hideaway was when the streets of Buckhead, originally, remember when they started construction on them, and then they went bankrupt because of the recession? So that started, they came up with all those problems – made up some of them – to close all those bars. Those bars were fine. They just needed more police activity, and you know, just some cleaning up,” D’Auria recalled. “So they finally closed them, so all those young people had nowhere to go. So they just kind of migrated to the Hideaway.”
Popularity on the scene beyond Johnny’s wildest dreams:
“My next trick I have to try and pull off is to get more space somehow, to where there’s not as long a line on Fridays and Saturdays,” admitted D’Auria. “If I’m driving by on Friday or Saturday night, if I’m not in there and I see the line, and I’ll text one of my managers, and I’ll have him mark what the line is, and he’ll say, ‘An hour and six minutes was the wait to get in on Saturday.’ I mean, some bar owners would say, ‘Oh, that’s great. That’s a good problem to have, right?’ But it’s a problem I don’t want to have – I’d rather be inside having a good time, rather than go to social media and say, ‘Oh, I tried to go to that Hideaway place and I waited an hour to get in.”
D’Auria recommended, “On Fridays, generally before 10:30, and on Saturdays before 9:30 is your guarantee. There’s an outlier every now and then, but generally, a line rarely starts before 9:30 on a Saturday, but that is the craziest night, crowd-wise.”
