You ever go into a situation not expecting to become the victim of a cruel joke, only to end up becoming the victim of a cruel joke, and then find that said joke wasn’t really a joke and you probably just said the wrong thing and you were actually hoisted by your own petard? Of course not, who would be so dumb as to let that happen to them… BTW, let me tell you a completely unrelated story, a horror story fitting for Octchober, about a Mexican restaurant I visited and the nachos I had there...
Taco Chulo is a Mexican restaurant located in Brooklyn and rumored to have legendary nachos. I guess it’s not really a rumor if Thrillist rates them as having the best nachos in the city, but if you don’t read this and are only told it I guess it can be considered as such. This is the part of the horror movie where the lusty teens drive down the road into the scary woods, and we the audience see a sign on the ground that they don’t stating something like “insane asylum ahead”. You the reader know that something bad is going to go down, but I the innocent nacho eater about to eat some as of yet have no idea.
The good thing about being a nacho fan is that you can go into pretty much any establishment and say “I’ll have the nachos please” and the server may ask you a meat or guac or whatever extras question and then some minutes later they will show up. You don’t even to look at a menu or anything, and nothing bad could ever come of this. Nothing bad, unless of course the restaurant has more than one type of nachos and the server doesn’t make any mention of this… You know where this is going.
My nachos arrived and I looked at them. Awfully red thought I, but I’m not going to let that slow me down, and afterall, I hear that these are the best nachos in all of New York City. I started in on them, and they weren’t bad, but were they up to the level I would expect for the best in all of NYC? Definitely not. Are New Yorker’s just soft and all their blustery exterior as seen on TV and movies all for show? To say that I was a little disappointed would be an understatement, but this disappointment got a million times worse when I bit into something in the nachos. Something dark. Something foul. Something so terrible that I once cut a restaurant out of my life entirely for doing the same thing to their nachos. I knew what it was, but not until now did I know the horrible word for it. That word: Escabeche.
Escabeche is kind of like a Mexican pickled vegetable medley, usually with jalapenos, carrots, cauliflower, and maybe an onion. Now pickled jalapenos and onions are heaven on earth, but pickled carrots do not belong on a regular order of nachos, and, if you will excuse the PG-13 rated language, fucking cauliflower pickled or otherwise does not belong anywhere other than the garbage. I’d even eat olives over cauliflower, and olives are a garbage food for garbage people. You may not find it surprising that someone whose favorite food is nachos looks down on cauliflower, but what can I say, I eat like a child. What else I can say is that Escabeche is gross, and when you’re chowing through some nachos and then bite into a piece of cauliflower, that’s like finding a cockroach covered in pubes actively pooping in your meal.
The eating ground to a stop as I had to now carefully sort through every chip in search of the foul little chunks of the devil as though I was doing an archeological dig in a minefield. Enjoyment gone, enthusiasm gone, interest gone, it was only the fact that I had dropped $15 on these guys and was going to get my money’s worth that kept me going. Eventually I just couldn’t do it and had to throw in the towel. Best nacho in NYC? 1000000 percent not. Man, was Thrillist going to get an angry message from me for sure.
I went home and started writing a review, THIS review, which involves pulling up the restaurant’s website to get info on it, and that’s when I saw a surprise I had not witnessed since Just Before Dawn or Scream. There was not one type of nachos at Taco Chulo, THERE WERE TWO!!!! Unbeknownst to me, what I wanted to have gotten were the Nachos Chulos, but what I had mistakenly ordered were the Nachos CLASSICOS! No wonder these seemed incredibly far away from the best nachos in all of NYC, they were a different dish entirely! Man, was there egg, and cauliflower, on my face!
These were the nachos I should have gotten instead. Nothing gross hiding under those chips and cheese!
So I blew it. I missed my opportunity to try the greatest nachos in all New York City, and instead got some nachos that were good if you like cauliflower, and a ticking minefield if you don’t. Cauliflower is bad, for sure, but as bad as missing out on some of the best nachos in the region? You know the answer to that, cauliflower is much, much worse. Hopefully one day though I’ll be able to get the best, but until then I will live every hour in utter disappointment. As bad as cauliflower is, my soul is even worse after this experience...