His restaurant has no walls. The tables are made of plastic. And the folding chairs sit so close to the street, diners hear the roar of rubber on pavement while they eat.

In the middle of it all, Pablo Perez serves just one kind of food: hot dogs. Sonoran hot dogs.

Perez is the owner of Nogales Hot Dogs, an outdoor eatery that has helped pioneer a Sonoran hot-dog revolution in Phoenix.

For the uninitiated, Sonoran hot dogs are bacon-wrapped wieners piled high with beans, mayonnaise, cheese, onions, tomatoes -- and for the more daring, mushrooms, guacamole, salsa and jalape�o peppers -- all stuffed inside a fluffy white Mexican roll called a bolillo.

Bacon-wrapped hot dogs are a fast-food staple in Sonora, Arizona's neighbor to the south. Known as "hot dogs estilo Sonora," they are so popular, Sonorenses, as people from that state are called, eat them as often as Mexicans in other states eat tacos.

A true crossover hybrid of American and Mexican border culture, Sonoran hot dogs also have long been popular in Arizona communities closer to the border. In Tucson, scores of restaurants and street vendors sell Sonoran hot dogs. This past summer, a battle between rival vendors became so heated, the FBI got involved. In the end, one Sonoran hot-dog vendor was charged with trying to extort $600,000 from another.

But here in Phoenix, Sonoran hot dogs are much more of a rarity. They have been available, for the most part, only in neighborhoods with high concentrations of Latinos.

That is where Perez, 42, is different. He opened Nogales Hot Dogs in 2001. But instead of the south or west sides of Phoenix, where he could have easily tapped into huge numbers of Latino customers, Perez opened his business on the east side of the city, on the corner of Indian School Road and 20th Street.

The ethnically and racially diverse area turned out to be the perfect spot to sell Sonoran hot dogs, although Perez admits his decision to place his business there was not part of any grand marketing scheme.

At first, most of his customers were Mexicans and Mexican-Americans already familiar with bacon-wrapped franks. But over the past decade, Perez has introduced Sonoran hot dogs to hundreds of non-Latinos, who stop by on their way home from work or on their way to and from bars. On a Friday night, his busiest time, Perez will sell upwards of 300 hot dogs at $3 a pop.

Now, half of his customers are non-Latinos.

"I have Americans, Chinese, Indians, African-Americans," Perez said one recent evening, during a brief lull in business.

A moment later, in walked David Postal.

A friend told Postal about Nogales Hot Dogs three years ago. Now, the 66-year-old attorney is a regular customer. He stops by for a Sonoran hot dog almost every week, usually on the way to his home in Glendale after playing bridge with friends at the Phoenix Country Club.

"The best part of it is the bun," Postal said. "And the hot dog -- they wrap it in bacon. Hell, anyone will eat anything wrapped in bacon."

No ordinary hot dog

Perez said the Sonoran hot dogs he sells are not ordinary American wieners.

He buys them at La Reyna Bakery in west Phoenix.

"We use the ones that are all meat, made out of pork, chicken and beef," Perez said.

La Reyna, on 35th Avenue in Maryvale, also supplies his hot-dog buns, which are softer and sweeter than American hot-dog buns.

In addition to Sonoran hot dogs, Perez also sells bottles of "Mexican Coke," which is made with cane sugar, not corn syrup like the version sold in the United States. In the winter, Perez also serves steaming cups of champurrado, a type of Mexican hot chocolate thickened with corn flour and spiced with cinnamon.

Nighttime is prime time

Nogales Hot Dogs is only open at night. It doesn't exist during the day, when Perez works as a handyman fixing and remodeling homes.

While Perez is working his day job, his wife, Monica, is busy at home getting everything ready for that night: baking the hot dogs wrapped in bacon, cooking the beans and slicing the tomatoes, onions and other condiments.

Perez then loads everything up, including the tables and chairs, into his white Chevy Astro van and drives from his home on the far west side of Phoenix to the corner of Indian School Road and 20th Street. On the way, he stops to pick up his stainless-steel hot-dog cart from a commissary on Van Buren Street, where he stores it overnight.

Perez unloads everything from his van and sets up the stand by 6 p.m. At 12:30 in the morning, 1:30 on the weekends, Perez packs everything back up and drives off. Just like that, poof, the restaurant disappears until the next night.

For the past decade, Perez has been doing this. Seven nights a week.

"The only days I take off are Christmas, New Year's and Thanksgiving," Perez said.

Striking out on his own

Perez the Sonoran hot-dog man grew up in Juarez, Mexico, which is not in Sonora.

Located across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Juarez is the largest city in Chihuahua, the Mexican state directly to the east of Sonora and south of Texas.

People in Chihuahua don't eat bacon-wrapped hot dogs, Perez said. That is Sonoran food.

When Perez was 8, his mother died. At 14, an older brother brought him to live in the United States. Perez went to high school in Winnemucca, a small mining town in northern Nevada.

After high school, Perez moved to Phoenix with his brother, who opened a tire shop. Perez, who said he became a U.S. citizen in 1996, worked at the tire shop for several years until he quit to focus on the hot-dog stand and his own handyman business.

Studying Phoenix's zoning maps

Nogales Hot Dogs is more than a hot-dog stand. The five tables and 18 chairs are neatly arranged under portable white canopies. A propane-powered lamp hissing in the corner provides soft lighting, and for entertainment, Perez hooks up a small flat-screen television to the van's battery.

But it's not quite a restaurant, either. The stand sits in the middle of a parking lot. In addition to the rumble of car tires, diners are treated to the smell of gas fumes from traffic whizzing by just a few feet away on Indian School Road.

Perez ended up in this spot almost by happenstance, the same way he got into the business of selling Sonoran hot dogs.

In 1997, a brother-in-law, Hernan Rivera, opened the original Nogales Hot Dogs on the corner of 35th Avenue and McDowell Road on the west side of Phoenix.

Unlike Perez, Rivera is from Sonora and named his stand after his hometown of Nogales.

A few years later, Perez's wife suggested Perez open a stand after she saw how well Rivera's stand was doing. "She wanted to make a little extra money, so I said, 'OK. Let's do it,' " Perez said.

Perez started hunting for a location. To get a permit from the city, he needed to find a spot with the proper zoning.

Perez got a copy of a city-zoning map and started looking for lots zoned C3, for general commercial.

Perez didn't want to compete against his brother-in-law. So he looked for spots on the east side. Then he had to find a business willing to let him rent space in the parking lot at night.

Perez said he first approached the owner of a building on the other side of Indian School and 20th Street, but that owner turned him down. He then tried the owner of a building on the southwestern corner. At the time, the building housed a guitar and keyboard store. Soon it would reopen as a horticulture-supply store.

The building's owner told Perez: "Let's give it try."

A proud businessman

For the past decade, Perez has been at the same spot.

Every night, customers line up in the parking lot to place their orders. Perez is comfortable speaking to them in either Spanish or English. He has two employees now, who prepare the hot dogs to order and place them on wax paper in baskets or wrap them in tin foil, depending on whether customers wish to eat there or take their hot dogs to go.

Most customers seem to prefer taking a seat at one of the tables and enjoying their food outside.

About three years ago, two men showed up as Perez was getting ready to close for the night.

One asked Perez what kind of food he served.

Bacon-wrapped hot dogs, Perez told them proudly.

The two men talked back and forth. Yes. No. Yes.

Perez thought they were trying to decide whether to place an order. Instead, they walked to their car and returned with a gun.

Perez knew what was coming. It was the third time he had been robbed. The man with the gun hit him below the chin, and the other took his money.

The next night, Perez opened Nogales Hot Dogs as usual. "And we are still here," he said.

The Arizona Republic, 12 News and azcentral.com present Arizona Storytellers, dedicated to telling Arizonans' stories, sponsored by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona. To see a video of hot-dog seller Pablo Perez, scan the code with a smartphone or go online and visit storytellers .azcentral.com.