How often do you go out for Cinco de Mayo? I mean, yes, once a year, because that’s how often it is, but what I’m talking about here is how many times HAVE you gone out for Cinco de Mayo in your life? Perhaps you are some sort of young person and have the stamina to go every year and make a fool of yourself, or maybe you are like me and just don’t have the patience to wait in line forever so you went out this year because you hadn’t been out on actual Cinco de Mayo in who knows how many years and figured, hey, you write for a nacho website, you ought to get on the ball here right? Right indeed, so I decided to hike up my pants, empty my nachos stomach, and head out to Plaza Azteca on the evening of May 5th.
I guess I could have made a reservation, but that’s not how I roll, so when rolling into the restaurant I expected to wait for quite some time for a seat, all the while assaulted by drunken revelers with sombreros and coronas. Fortunately though, and I’m sure due entirely to the blessings of the god Chalchiuhcihuatl, it was only 45 minutes, which is about an hour less than I thought it would take. I was thrilled, but not nearly as thrilled as I was when I saw there was a dish by the name of “OMG Nachos” on the menu. I had already made the poor choice of not getting a yard of margarita and was not going to let these bad boys slip through my fingers, not on this day. Like most menus there wasn’t a picture of these shown, so I wasn’t exactly sure what I was to expect, other than something that would make me say “OMG”, but I waited with baited breath.
What showed up really wasn’t epic enough to make me say “OMG”, but it did look pretty tasty, and more importantly tasted pretty tasty when I started digging into it. There’s chicken, there’s chorizo, there’s applewood smoked bacon, there’s the implicit promise that you can’t beat a dish that has two different animals served in three different ways. While I was pondering this though, I noticed another two issues; (A) that there wasn’t any cheese on this, and (B) I could count the total number of chips in the dish, and it was nine.
Now as delicious as these were so far, they came inherently problematic. Of the three base tenants of nachos; chips, cheese, and jalapenos, there needs to be some equivalent of all these in the dish for a balance, so can you even call these nachos without cheese in them? Any of the three tenets can be substituted with something of an equivalent matter, so I guess the refried beans count as holding everything together like the cheese would? Now this was not a mistake, it is listed in the menu as having no cheese, but without that can I truly call them “OMG”? I think not.
The other issue here is that they’re trying to sneak by some Single Serving Nachos via subterfuge and misnaming. I don’t have an issue with Single Serving Nachos as a type of nachos, I just want to know what I can expect when I order something. Presented with this massive pile of delicious toppings I knew the horrible event that would occur after eating these nine chips. I would be left with a huge pile of toppings and no chips to take care of them, as seen here:
I can’t tell you if going out on Cinco de Mayo is worth it, unless you go somewhere than hands out free shirts or sombreros and you need one, that’s your call. I can tell you that I like nacho leavings as much as the next person, but at some level there comes a point where there are so many toppings leftover that you can make a whole second order of nachos out of them. At that point you’re just one step away from the classic philosophical question of “If you have an order of nachos, eat all the chips, then add some new chips, then eat all the toppings, then add some new toppings, is it even the same order of nachos anymore?” Is that what the “OMG” in these OMG Nachos even means? That’s a question for a better person than I to ponder...
P.S. Remember back in 2001 you were first playing around with HTML and made it so that your Geocities page played a song every time you loaded it? Well I don’t want to spoil it but if you go to the Plaza Azteca website you will be into quite the blast from the past!
