hotelMystery Diners · Season 10, Episode 9 · Aired July 29, 2015
Old Vinings Inn
Vinings, Georgia
Good outcome here: the business is still trading today.
What happened after
Restaurant/private dining venue still operating with regular hours.
What happened on the show
Lee Schulman kept hearing about unauthorized Civil War tours running through his historic Vinings restaurant. Charles Stiles sent his history-minded investigator Eliot and a single mystery diner, Kendall, in as a customer and a waitress. As aired, a recently hired waiter was staging the bogus tours with a friend who knew nothing about the war, botching basic facts, once placing Lincoln at a hotel that did not yet exist, while padding the tours out with packaged food and wine spiked with vinegar, all passed off as period-authentic. The confrontation has Lee firing the waiter. Stiles closes with the fake tours ended. Because Mystery Diners was later accused of scripting these reveals, this history-tour sting is best read as broadcast rather than as independently confirmed.
After the cameras left
Old Vinings Inn is still open, a going concern the episode never threatened. The restaurant and private-dining venue at 3011 Paces Mill Road keeps regular hours, its OpenTable listing freshly updated at our 2026 check. An established room that appeared on a crisis show simply kept serving, its survival the ordinary kind rather than a rescue. The fake-tour drama made a memorable episode; it was never the measure of whether this inn would last, and it has comfortably held on.
Sources
Confidence: high. Last checked 2026-07-19.
What is there now
Street imagery via Google Maps. Location approximate.