Her meal plan provides students fried pork chops, white rice sopped in pan gravy, collard greens and butterbeans --- along with entree to the South of their forebears. The ticket for passage is a meat-and-three, the traditional midday fare of working-class Southerners: one meat and three sides, with corn bread or hot rolls, washed down with sweaty tumblers of lemonade or iced tea.

Historians would say that the meat-and-three is a mid-20th-century restaurant adaptation of the groaning table meal that once fueled farmers plowing the back 40 and washerwomen creek-scrubbing denims. Sociologists would add that meat-and-three cafes are democratic spaces. They would speak of the elbow-rubbing community that calls such places home. And they might argue that servers and staff at meat-and-three cafes act as exemplars of modern Southern hospitality.

Parents, on the other hand, are more practical. They believe that a house account at a cafe like Wilson's ensures their progeny will eat something other than burgers and fries.

Educating the college crowd

The meat-and-three matters more in a college town. And so do the places that serve it. For students, many of whom are exploring the world beyond their own driveway for the first time, evocations of home --- comfort, care, loving admonishment --- prove important.

At Weaver D's, a white cinderblock diner on the edge of downtown Athens, ebullient Dexter Weaver serves the signature food of the African-American experience: crisp chicken drumsticks, straight from the fryer basket --- not to mention nutmeg-spiked sweet potato souffle, collard greens awash in fatback-enriched potlikker, and squash casserole bound with cheddar.

But his metier is cajoling young charges while dishing advice. "Don't you think you ought to get something green on your plate?" he asks a slouchy boy in a polo shirt. "I know you want white-meat chicken and mashed potatoes with gravy, but don't you want a little something green? How about some collards? Come on, make your mama proud!"

Weaver relishes his role. That puts him in league with old-guard meat-and-three retainers from beyond the college circuit, people like Addie Williams, who once worked the U-shaped lunch counter at the downtown Atlanta Macy's. She slung meatloaf and pole beans while evaluating the eating habits of her beloved customers: Clean your plate and she marked your ticket with an A, but a minor infraction, say an unnecessary reach for the salt shaker, and your grade dropped precipitously.

At Wilson's, tough love is the rule. "My people, they will be at work, taking orders from their bosses, or studying and typing on a computer for hours," Angelish Wilson says. "It's my job to feed them. ... If I find out one has got high blood pressure, I tell him, 'I know you had a pork chop the other day; I saw, I know, and today you'll be taking your vegetables.' "

Steeped in history

The meat-and-three cafes of Athens are not just museums of cookery and custom. They do more than satisfy cravings for nostalgia and caretaking. Spend a few days at table, and you'll discover that some of these spots serve as archetypes of a uniquely Southern ethic.

At Five Star Day Cafe, cater-cornered from the archway entrance to the campus, fliers for the bands Dubconscious and the Dictatortots paper the windows. A pitched tin roof, festooned with Japanese paper lanterns, overhangs the sidewalk. A cutout of Mr. T plasters the tip jar.

Bottles of homemade vinegar sauce, bobbing with chunks of habanero and toes of garlic, grace the flower-print-patterned tabletops. And the food, dubbed "gourmet soul" by co-proprietor Mary Long, is referentially if not reverentially Southern: meatloaf stuffed with handmade mozzarella, free-form macaroni and cheese made with shell pasta, al dente collard greens.

Advice, of the philosophical or physiological kind, is left to Bob Dylan. His "Highway 61" plays in heavy rotation at Five Star Day.

Across town, at Rooster's BBQ, in the Boulevard neighborhood, 30-somethings Darryl Grant and Joel Martin --- the former a self-described military brat, the latter a native of Dallas, Ga. --- have, since opening in September 2005, honed a proudly schizophrenic restaurant from a space that has previously housed a vegan cafe and a butcher shop.

The country-store exterior is unassuming. In the side yard, a trio of grills billow smoke. Inside, plank floors stretch the length of a Spartan rectangle. Photographs of vestigial Southern scenes, of sweet potato curing houses and clapboard churches, stripe the white walls. Sleeves of Moon Pies and loaves of Sunbeam line a vintage bakery box. Opposite the computer carrel is a porcelain butcher case, retrofitted to accommodate steam table hotboxes full of vegetables. Think hipster-fied Foxfire and you're drawing a bead on the feel.

The food is honest, forthright. Though ostensibly a barbecue restaurant, Rooster's serves a common meat-and-three variant, the four-way vegetable plate. It's worthy of your patronage if only for the green beans, bathed in a ferrous pork stock, and the elbow macaroni, creamy with cheese custard. But two vegan dishes --- squash, cooked until it collapses in a pleasantly salty heap, and collard greens, swimming in a broth enriched by soy sauce, white vinegar and garlic --- are the head-turners.

"What we're doing is playing off the fascination with traditional Southern food," Grant says when asked to explain the vegan offerings in a region where tradition holds that any vegetable benefits from a berth in a pot roiling with smoked and cured pig parts. "Our look, the way this place feels, is coincidental. But our aims are not. This is more about options than about change. We want to help you make your own choices. But we're not trying to go fancy with this. That wouldn't work. People seem to forget that this kind of cooking came out of simpler, more frugal times."

A dish of their own

Back at Wilson's Soul Food , Hugh Acheson, the chef-owner of an across-town white-tablecloth restaurant, Five & Ten, has stopped in for a bite to eat. "This food is simple," he says as he douses his smothered pork chop with hot sauce and forks a heap of collards. "This food is relevant."

A native of Canada, Acheson takes his cues from classical French as well as traditional Southern cooking. He earned his Southern credentials by marrying into a South Carolina family. He honed them by paying attention.

"Southern cooking --- typical meat-and-three cooking --- is universal," says Acheson, who sports an oversize radish tattoo on the underside of his left forearm. "What's happening now is that cooks are making it their own. Take collards. I love the bouncy flavor of traditional greens. I love the way the richness and sweetness of cured pork plays off the vinegary spine of the greens. Well-cooked greens hit the top and bottom and sides of your mouth with sugar and meat and fat. That's the kind of dish I like to play with."

Adds the chef who introduced Athens to red grouper swaddled in boiled peanut beurre blanc: "I won't pervert it. I won't make it pompous. I could always make a ham hock broth. I can see using banyuls vinegar instead of cider vinegar. Maybe adding red pepper flakes. Maybe a little bit of apple-smoked bacon or pancetta. Yeah, we can work with that."

He rises from the oilcloth-draped table, bound for the kitchen, where he'll pay his respects to Angelish Wilson. "Our customers aren't all that different from Wilson's. I can't serve them a Tuscan steak with a leaf of arugula. They expect a starch and a vegetable or two. And why not? They were born to it.

"We abide by that."

ATHENS EATS: IF YOU GO

Five Star Day Cafe
• 191 E. Broad St.,
• 706-543-8552.

Gourmet soul food
(i.e., meatloaf stuffed with handmade mozzarella).
• Five & Ten,
• 1653 S. Lumpkin St.,
• 706-546-7300.
Chef-driven white-tablecloth restaurant informed by Southern sensibilities and ingredients.

Rooster's BBQ
• 217 Hiawassee Ave.,
• 706-353-1000.
Besides barbecue, this hip joint offers vegan-friendly veggies and tofu dishes.

Weaver D's
• 1016 E. Broad St.,
706-353-7797.
Eat the sweet potato casserole. Dexter Weaver's slogan, "Automatic for the People," inspired R.E.M.'s hit album.

Wilson's Soul Food
• 351 N. Hull St.,
• 706-353-7289.
Another Athens soul food institution.