Atlanta Magazine put a spotlight on Bar Ana, the Poncey-Highland dessert and cocktail spot from multitime James Beard semifinalist Claudia Martinez. The bar opened late last year in the basement of El Ponce Mexican restaurant on Ponce de Leon Avenue, on the same site that once housed the El Bar dive and dance bar.
Getting in is part of the experience. Visitors enter through the El Ponce parking lot, cross the back patio, and round the corner to a dark green door marked Bar Ana in gold lettering. Inside the magazine describes a chic retreat with stucco arches, dark wood floors, a marble-topped bar with sea-colored subway tiles, and a vine-wrapped ceiling trellis. A pale pink neon light backlights the spirits shelves.
The drink program is run by Mayim Williams, a Kimball House alum, with cocktails like the Ana daiquiri (Caribbean rum, passion fruit, vanilla, lime, cardamom) and the Guava G&T built around guava gin and Granada-Vallet, a Mexican pomegranate liqueur. Martinez's dessert work, the reason the room exists in the first place, draws on her Southern background and her years building pastry programs at some of Atlanta's better restaurants.
Poncey-Highland has been quietly stacking its bar list. Bar Ana sits in walking distance to the Beltline Eastside Trail and to anchors like Manuel's Tavern, and the El Ponce basement is the kind of small-room hideout that Atlanta has been short on. The magazine writeup is the first big national-style review since the soft opening and is likely to push reservation pressure for the next few weeks.
