With the silver serving set, Madame Denis helped herself to a banana from the fruit platter. With knife and fork, she cut off the tip and the stem before making a clean incision down the length of the peel. She eased the fruit free of its jacket and ate it, bite by bite, with her utensils. Clank, clank, clank went her knife against the plate.

"Would you like a piece of fruit, John?" she asked, passing me the platter. I looked with anxiety at the platter of apples, oranges and bananas before taking a grape. I prayed I didn't have to peel it.

(ENLARGE)

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You can learn a lot about a culture from its attitude toward fruit. At this dinner party in France, for instance, I learned that only polite and extremely coordinated people enjoy apples at the dinner table. The rest of us feign disinterest.

In Japan, fruit is the ultimate gift for a host or hostess, and there's a cult of perfection. Gorgeous melons come in their own wooden crates and can fetch more than $100 apiece. Huge, freakishly uniform strawberries come wrapped in a box like bonbons.

In our household — which I can assume is more or less typical for Americans — we present fruit with less respect. It sits in a bowl on the counter looking virtuous and hospitable at first, then scary soon thereafter. The oranges turn as hard as duck-pin bowling balls while the bananas progress well past the banana bread stage into the realm of gangrene.

Mexicans have the best attitude. They treat fruit as a snack to be eaten on a whim and as often as possible. From street stalls to fruiterias displaying bins of cut melon, mango, pineapple and whatever else is in season, fruit is there for the eating.

In Atlanta, there are at least two fruiterias worth discovering.

Tropical Corner — a stall in the Plaza Fiesta on Buford Highway — beckons with tubs of a dozen fresh-cut fruits and juicy vegetables. You order a small or large clamshell container and point to whatever looks appealing or simply ask for a little of all. Even if the thought of shredded carrots and cucumber slices with your mango and watermelon seems an unlikely treat, you should try it. When the fruit is ready, the stall keeper will squeeze a half lime over the top and sprinkle it with salt and spicy guajillo chile powder.

A decidedly hipper version of the fruiteria can be found at Lottafrutta in the Old Fourth Ward. Look for the building painted with a likeness of Carmen Miranda, and you've found it.

Owner Myrna Perez, who grew up in the Texas border town of McAllen, remembers crossing to Reynosa, Mexico, with her mother or grandmother for a fruit cup sold in a street market. "I always got a cup of cucumber and watermelon with lime juice and chile," she recalls.

Perez reproduces the flavor with the mixed fruit cup she calls Limonatta. She also sells fruit cups with cream, granola and yogurt, and orange juice.

Now that the weather's warming up, Perez has also started making wonderful paletas — Mexican fruit ice pops — following recipes her grandmother taught her. Coconut, tamarind, watermelon and a fantastically sweet-and-sour passion fruit are among her flavors.

Good pressed sandwiches and drinks round out the small, appealing menu.

But once you get a taste of the Limonatta, you may learn to get cravings. Fruit is neither something to be admired nor displayed, but handed out by the quart on a hot day.

Tropical Corner: Inside Plaza Fiesta. 4166 Buford Highway, Stall G1. 404-982-9138 for Plaza Fiesta.

Lottafrutta: 590-A Auburn Ave.,404-588-0857.