Atlanta – Combining different foods for new taste thrills has been around since the first cannibals combined a mango salad with filet de Spanish explorer. We’ve all done it at one time. You’re at the end of the month, money’s low and so is your patience. You look in your refrigerator and throw together the leftovers.
At 4 in the morning once while living in Las Vegas, I combined couscous from a Moroccan restaurant with soy-caked vegetables from a botched attempt at stir fry. Wasn’t bad.
Another time at 5 in the morning, I tried leftover pasta alfredo with canned chili con carne. Wasn’t good. (Hey, look. It beats one of the Strip’s $1.99 botulism buffets where cuisines from China to Chile all seem to come from the same pot.)
So you have to be careful what you combine. Fusion restaurants became the rage in the ’80s, particularly the Pan Pacific joints where Asian cuisines have such gray borders and blend so well with anything American. Others work, too. In Denver, Zengo combines Latin with Asian. In Longmont, Tortugas joins Southern and Caribbean.
In Atlanta, they hit on a terrific quiniela. They’ve combined good ol’ fashioned Southern cookin’ with Southwest cuisine. The call it South by Southwest and package it in a restaurant called Taqueria del Sol.
Atlanta is blossoming with high-end five-star restaurants but is too much of a mix of urban and rural to have its own specialty. You won’t find the little Southern country diners that you can find around Georgia’s backwoods.
Surprisingly, South by Southwest works. The only problem is it combines two of the highest-fat cuisines known to man, but Taqueria del Sol is a major hit here.
Before the recent Notre Dame-Georgia Tech football game, I drove to the Midtown area of northwest Atlanta and found Taqueria del Sol in one of the 2,800 strip malls that make up the city. I stood in line to order at the counter and stared at the menu.
Every time I see fusion dishes they remind me of two bored cooks with a bottle of tequila, an imagination and a notepad. The Taqueria del Sol menu is wild. Fried chicken tacos. Beef brisket enchiladas. Jalapeño coleslaw. One special that night was scallops ajillo, made with white wine, garlic, green onions and chile de arbol and served with habanero-cheese grits.
I went against my lifetime rule by ordering a margarita east of the Mississippi and sat on the patio. Electric fans and the surprisingly tasty margarita that hit me like a Notre Dame free safety kept me cool on a muggy night. I looked out at the skyline of Atlanta and ordered a Memphis taco, a fried chicken taco, a beef brisket enchilada and jalapeño coleslaw.
It wasn’t the best Southwestern food I’ve ever had. But I’m not a big fan of the deep-fried gut bombs Southern cuisine offers and the combination was perfect. The fried chicken taco matched the fish taco of Rubio’s, the only fast-food place I’ll patronize, as the best taco I’ve had in the U.S. In a soft flour tortilla, the chicken was crispy but the moist meat inside was lathered in a lime-jalapeño mayonnaise, which, if marketed, would wipe Best Foods from the planet.
The Memphis taco, chopped smoked pork with tequila barbecue sauce, was tasty but hotter than Peachtree Street in July. I ordered another margarita and devoured the chilly coleslaw before digging into the beef brisket enchilada.
Now can you combine two fatter dishes than brisket and an enchilada? I don’t think you can. However, when I got up to pay the bill that was ridiculously low I wasn’t nearly as bloated as I thought. The dishes aren’t huge and the lardy refried beans can be ordered only as a side dish.
This fusion idea belongs to two guys from, accordingly, Memphis and Mexico. Mike Klank grew up in Memphis but fell in love with Taos, N.M. The other owner, Eddie Hernandez, hails from Monterrey, Mexico. The end result is three restaurants with another in suburban Decatur and one more, called the Sundown Café, on Cheshire Bridge Road in Buckhead.
They’ve done their share of experimenting, too. How does pork loin with jalapeño spatzle sound? Or blue corn meal onion rings?
“As long as some dish is South and Southwest it usually flies pretty well,” said chef David Waller, who was raised around the South but also worked for the Coyote Café in Santa Fe for three years. “Southern cooking started poor with humble beginnings. So did a lot of Southwestern. Southwest can include Mexico to the southern U.S. to the Pacific Northwest. It’s a combination of all of them.
“There were trails from east to west across the U.S. but also north and south. That’s where the amalgamation of food comes from.”
When I walked out the door, the line went outside, into the parking lot and nearly to my rental car. Buenas noches, y’all.
Staff writer John Henderson covers sports and writes about the food he eats on the road. He can be reached at 303-954-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com.
