Chances are you probably have a store around that has knick-knacks and tchotchkes and other things you’d see in the home of someone on a Hallmark holiday movie set in a small American town. If you’re real lucky that place also sells strange knock off foods coming from Canada or alternate dimensions being sold for a fine price. For me that place is Christmas Tree Shops, and these are a few of the types of chips they sell. It’s time for Cheap Chip Showdown.

Do you have one of those places in your life, some location, that you’ve passed by a million times in the course of your days and always thought, “Man, I should really check that out.”, but you never do? Years go by and it remains a mystery as you continue to think that one day you’ll stop by. You grow old. Your flesh sags. Your bones wither. Your organs fail. The face that looks back at you from the mirror is a stranger. As you’re lying in your death bed, the only things keeping you on this mortal place being the machines with tubes running into your body making it work, the fog of your addled brain clears just long enough for you to think, “Man, I should have really checked that place out...”, and then you die. Your family buries you in the ground and leaving the cemetery they pass that place and think, “You know, I should really check that place out.” The cycle continues.

Why do restaurants change their menus? Do they think they’re cool, mixing things up and throwing off anyone that goes there expecting the food they are accustomed to? I’m sure this “surprise” may come as a positive for some people, but for the rest it is frequently a disappointment. Especially when it comes to nachos.

Some days you wake up, go down to the nacho well to get your tri-monthly commentary, reel up that old wooden bucket in expectation of some nice, cool writings, and find that it’s completely empty. Not just empty, but bone dry, and also a cow fell in and died down there, poisoning the whole thing. Yessiree, that well is a goner, and you need to find yourself a hot new nacho source, fast. Fortunately there is one nacho well that never runs dry, so I headed down to Taco Bell to try the new Grande Nachos Box.

I like Mezcal Tequila Cantina. I like Nachos. I like Barbacoa Pork. So when I last went to Mezcal Tequila Cantina and saw they had Barbacoa Pork Nachos on their menu I thought God had answered my prayers. Then I saw that there were plantain chips on them, with the possibility that they had used them to replace the corn chips, and thought it might actually be the Devil. This was a mystery I had to solve.