We’ve all got that one restaurant in town. You know the one I’m talking about, it seems like it’s been there forever, it always looks like it’s busy, and yet neither you or anyone you know has ever been there? Your town undoubtedly has one, or even several, places like these, and one day you might even go there. I sure did, because if I hadn’t none of this intro would have been related to the review for Lakeside Bar & Grill, and have to say that I certainly got some nachos.

Calling your restaurant “Lakeside” is fairly generous when you are located about a third of mile from a lake. “Poolside” would have been more accurate as it is next to a pool supply store, but I realize you have to upsell these sorts of things, and considering the full parking lot the name didn’t seem to matter. The joint was packed, the food was cheap, and my nacho options were Chicken, Chili, and “Ultimate”. What, praytell, are “Ultimate” nachos? Well I asked my waitress, hoping for something astounding and amazing, but was not totally disappointed when told that it was just chicken AND chili combined. Despite what Burger King had done with its Nightmare King, mixing chicken with what I would have to guess would be beef chili was a trans-species barnyard beast combination of such magnitude that I had to wonder if it even legal. Could I dare resist either way? No. Which is why I said, “I’ll have the ultimate nachos, with guacamole, and no olives please.” Remember the no olive part, because we’ll come back to it in a second.

What speedily arrived were, as you can see from the above picture, a giant plate of nachos. A mellifluous mountain of multitudinous morsels made to manifest mirth and merriment in my mouth, and certainly not a mass of malodorous malcontents menacingly marching in malefic maneuvers of malfeasance. With a pile of chips that big what could possibly be wrong with them? Well, the black olives in them, which if you remember from 89 words ago I wanted no part of. Everyone knows that olives taste like an old ashtray and belong only in the garbage, but I get it, these things happen. It’s unfortunate that it happened, but no big deal, the world moves, I’ve eaten nachos with black olives that have been accidentally left on and lived. There’s my one bad thing for the day, and nothing else bad can happen with these nachos. Wrong.

When you’re cooking a turkey you have to toss that bad boy in the oven and cook it for hours in order to get it thoroughly cooked all the way through. That’s a turkey. Nachos you put under a broiler for a few minutes until the cheese on top gets melted and then it’s good to go. If you had to leave an order of ‘chos under a broiler for long enough to heat up the inside, your top cheese layer would be blackened and immolated ash, which why if you’re making a giant pile of nachos you need to cook it in layers for proper meltage. Observe improper meltage.

If you get through the top layer of cheese and chips and then stumble across a layer of unmelted shredded cheese, somebody done goofed cause that ain’t how nachos work. This is not a sight you want to behold unless you plan on eating off the top layer and then bringing the remainder home to reheat in your oven, which is also not how nachos work. Nachos work with all parts being cooked for exactly how long they should be, no more, no less, and certainly no unmelted cheese.

Tio’s Mexican Cafe, home of the 5 lb platter of nachos (which we have described as being the best nachos in all of America) known as Mt. Nacheesmo, makes a literal five pound mountain of nachos and manages to layer and cook them perfectly. Lakeside’s nachos were maybe two pounds tops, so you do the math on how much easier that should be to cook all the way through. This may have just been a one shot deal, a mere single cooking oversight, but pretty much rule one of nachos is you need to cook all your cheese. Both Ignacio Anaya, who meticulously shredded and made sure the cheese was melted on the first order of nachos back in 1943, and Frank Liberto, who dealt only in melted liquid cheese, would have been sent to early graves witnessing this, and were still alive of course. It is truly a sad day in nacho history if a place could have gotten these two titans of nachoness to agree on anything cheese related.