Taqueria del Sol serves what may be the best cup of greens in Atlanta. (Yes, that includes Mary Mac's, the country-come-to-town favorite. And Thelma's Kitchen, the soul food standard-bearer.) Spiked with chiles, threaded with tomatoes, rich with chicken stock, the potlikker in which those greens bob is intoxicating. And so is the story behind them.

It started with a black trash bag, says Mike Klank, who, along with partner Eddie Hernandez, owns and operates the three-unit mini-chain, based in Atlanta. "One of our good customers, a guy named Bobby Avery, showed up with a bag of greens from his garden; Eddie took it from there."

LOUIE FAVORITE/AJC (ENLARGE)

Melina Dailey (red check shirt) and Sarah Justice dig in during the lunch rush at Taqueria del Sol

LOUIE FAVORITE/AJC (ENLARGE)

Over time, chef Eddie Hernandez (left) and operations guy Mike Klank built a friendship based on mutual respect, and a business was born. 'We trust each other's palates,' Klank says.

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That was back in the late 1980s. Hernandez, a native of Monterrey, Mexico, where his grandmother owned bars and restaurants, was manning the stoves at Azteca Grill, down near Southlake Mall.

Klank, a native of Memphis who studied civil engineering at Georgia Tech and fell hard for beans and rice and chile verde during a post-college stint in New Mexico, was managing the fast-casual restaurant.

The area around Southlake Mall was then still somewhat rural. And many of Azteca Grill's customers were agrarian, at least in spirit. "They would drop off peas and beans for us, corn, too — sometimes even venison," Klank says. "We couldn't do much with the deer, but we put the vegetables to good use."

That bag of greens was the first step toward fried chicken with lime mayo and refried black-eyed peas, Klank says. The first step toward Sundown Cafe and, eventually, the three Taqueria del Sol restaurants that now dish modern meat-and-threes to multicultural Atlanta.

A recipe for success

Turnip greens were a challenge for Hernandez, who, at 17, emigrated to Houston to play drums in Facinacion, a cover band that won a reputation and a recording contract playing Spanish language versions of rock anthems like "Love Hurts." Hernandez knew epazote and nopales. But turnip greens were a cipher.

"We started playing around with the food," says Klank, who honed Azteca Grill from a flagging unit in the El Azteca chain. "[We] started listening to our customers and trying to marry what they wanted to eat with what we wanted to cook."

"He said to use pork stock," recalls Hernandez. "He said that's what people around here did with greens, cook them in pork stock. But we didn't have any — didn't have any ham hock to make stock with either — so I reached for chicken. And I sauteed them in chicken stock, adding onion and garlic and tomato and chile de arbol," the latter a reference to the slender red slips that a native Southerner might recognize as similar to the pods that have long flavored our pepper vinegars.

They were an instant hit, Klank says. "Bobby started coming by every Friday with a bag of greens. We were serving them as a bar snack, for regulars. At that point we were bullying our customers, forcing them to move beyond burritos and try our specials. But people took to those turnip greens; they were our breakthrough."

Shifting demographics

Atlanta is going Latin. So is Georgia and the South as a whole. According to the latest decennial census, the Hispanic population in Georgia grew 300 percent between 1990 and 2000. And then there's the great salsa-is-more-popular-than-ketchup statistic: Hispanics are now the largest minority group in the United States.

For a city like Atlanta, in a state like Georgia, in a region like the American South, where the oftentimes fitful interplay of black and white has long defined the civic ethic, such demographic shifts are tectonic.

But not at a Taqueria del Sol. At any one of the three Atlanta locations, where orders are taken at hightop counters and tacos come nestled in parchment-lined plastic baskets, South and Southwest fuse easily. Memphis and Monterrey do, too.

Business is born

The melting pot "is a social ideal that, when applied to culinary arts, produces abominations," wrote Octavio Paz, the Mexican-born poet and thinker. (Paz may have been pondering Burger King's thumb-of-the-nose to French cookery, the Croissan'wich, or Taco Bell's Meximelt.)

For the most part, Taqueria del Sol has avoided culinary and cultural abominations. (Even their saltine cracker-coated chicken, a sometimes special, has honest roots in the South's community cookbook tradition, wherein broccoli and squash casseroles alike gain crunch by way of crumbled Ritz crackers.)

Instead, Taqueria del Sol — which now has a catering operation and will soon open a fourth location 70 miles up the road in Athens — has, in this day of Minutemen patrols and razor-wire fencing along the Rio Grande, accomplished something miraculous, a border straddle.

Taqueria del Sol is Southern: They serve hacked pork barbecue, topped with coleslaw. And it's Mexican: That barbecue comes tucked in a flour tortilla, and the slaw is chocked with jalapeno.

"I don't consider it a typical Mexican restaurant," says William Vaughn, a condominium concierge who dines regularly at the Ponce de Leon Avenue location. He grew up on traditional Southern food in his native Decatur and likes the restaurant's riffs on home-cooking favorites. "There's no Mexican restaurant like the Taqueria," he adds. "You try to compare it but you can't."

Taqueria del Sol's whitewashed facades and industrial chic interiors, accented by tin-topped tables — some of which are blazoned with ads for Mexican beers — weren't conceived by a trend hound of a restaurateur. Each location, from the west side flagship to downtown Decatur and strip mall Cheshire Bridge, evolved over time, as Klank, the operations guy, and Hernandez, the kitchen guy, forged a friendship that birthed a business.

The path from renegade El Azteca to a Latin version of the Colonnade (the venerable meat-and-three, famous for fried chicken livers and whipped potatoes) was crooked. In the late 1990s, while in the kitchen at Sundown Cafe, the Cheshire Bridge precursor to Taqueria del Sol, Hernandez fused Mexican and Cajun cooking. "That was the thing to do, back then," he says. "We were game for anything. Cajun, Chinese, it didn't matter."

Those were the days of Cajun chimichangas, stuffed with red beans and rice and andouille sausage, drizzled with mojo sauce, served with an iceberg wedge, garnished with spicy Thousand Island dressing. Those were the days when specials served at Passover included nachos made with matzo crackers, which Hernandez couldn't help but call machos.

More recently, especially over the past five years, Klank and Hernandez have refined and focused their approach. They have jettisoned crawfish tamales, smothered with a kinda sorta etouffee. And they have abandoned fine dining aspirations, retiring from their repertoire plancha-griddled skate wing in a sauce of acorn squash and guajillo peppers.

Instead, Klank and Hernandez have focused on the sweet spot where refried pinto beans meet refried black-eyed peas.

Gospel of good eats

Which brings us to today. The dinner line at the Cheshire Bridge Taqueria del Sol has not yet begun to form. The bar is not yet thronged by regulars, noshing guacamole and chips and throwing back beers while waiting on baskets of fried chicken tacos.

As employees bustle about the blue and white-tiled dining room, setting tables, Klank and Hernandez talk of turnip greens. Of shrimp and corn chowder. Of hoppin' Juan.

They sound a bit like a long-tenured married couple, rehashing their courtship. "We trust each other's palates, Klank says. "Yeah, but you spit out that fig sauce I made one time," Hernandez says. "You had a different idea about gravy."

"That's why I took you on a tour of Southern restaurants; we hit the Colonnade on Cheshire Bridge, the White House on Peachtree," Klank says.

"And I started cooking buttermilk fried chicken with green beans and green chile sauce," Hernandez says.

Out of that playful bickering has come something approximating beauty. In building Taqueria del Sol into an almost-institution, Klank and Hernandez have divined fast-casual restaurants that matter. Restaurants that dish blue-plate specials, garnished with cilantro. And pour molar-rattling sweet tea, as well as reposada margaritas. And practice — but refrain from preaching — a biracial gospel of good eats that all can embrace.

— John T. Edge is director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi. Visit the the alliance Web site www.southernfoodways.com.