The Great New York Nacho Fail

These aren’t nachos, I thought to myself as I stared at a plate rimmed with neatly placed tortilla chips, each one gently topped with chicken, blanketed in cheese, and, for good measure, crowned by one single jalapeño slice. I might expect something like this if Jean-George Vongerichten put nachos on the menu at this eponymous eatery on Columbus Circle. But I was at a hole-in-the-wall eatery in Brooklyn bedecked with all the trappings of a salt-of-the-earth Mexican restaurant. Dressing up each chip as it were a microcosm of the usual mountain of nachos seemed unnecessary. And just plain wrong.

When I was growing up in Southern California, nachos were my go-to dish. And I knew them well. I could easily tell when, for example, the restaurant used homemade chips or when old cooking oil was used to fry the tortillas. I could tell when the cheese or meat was a low quality. So when I order nachos in New York City—cue chorus of Texan cowboys yelling, “New York City?”—I get nearly offended when I see this subpar interpretation.

Nachos actually aren’t a very Mexican dish. In fact, they smack of 20th-century globalized American comfort food: a mountain of fried chips piled high with a slop of gooey cheese, greasy meat, salsa and jalapeños. It all started, apparently, in 1943 in Piedras Negras, a tiny border town on the Mexican side of the fence. One day about a dozen military wives, on a south-of-the-border shopping expedition, strolled into a restaurant that was about to close. The maitre d’, Ignacio Anaya, ran back in the kitchen to find there wasn’t much food left except for some tortillas, cheese and jalapeños. So he cut up the tortillas into triangle shapes and fried them. He sprinkled on some cheese, threw on some peppers, and then heated the whole thing up. “Ladies,” Ignacio might have said as he strode back into the dining room a few minutes later, holding a mountain of cheese and chips, “I present to you: nachos.”

After that nachos took off in the United States, first in Texas and eventually in California. Only to make their way across the country to New York and, well, sort of all apart. Which is a shame, but maybe some day, the city will get something worthy of Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya’s dish.

Until then, I’ll savor the memories of California nachos until my next visit.

©2026 World Hum, All Rights Reserved