The Nacho Game

For me, nachos stir up a comforting haze of childhood memory: weekend playdates at friends’ sunlit New York City apartments in first grade, watching Scooby Doo and drinking orange-flavored seltzer with a plate of loaded chips between us. I’m not sure if I’m recalling a single moment that actually happened, but the feeling is real: ease and safety, fun and laughter, and a delightful combination of textures and flavors.

For a while there, I almost forgot about nachos, at least as something I would actually eat. They were just a childhood food, a memory. To paraphrase of St. Paul: “when I was a child, I [ate] as a child, I [tasted] as a child, I [thought about food] as a child,” and so, perhaps becoming a man meant “putting away childish [foods.]” Eventually I did remember nachos and the power they have to comfort and bond when friends dismantle a plate of them together, talking around each many-layered bite. That was one evening a couple months before the pandemic began, as I gave my friend dear Olivia a tour of my New York and we ducked into a little Mexican Restaurant on the Lower East Side.

Like Paul, I find that I speak, think, and reason differently than I did when I was a child, about food, and everything else. But rather than put away the things of my childhood, whether nachos or instant ramen, the Harry Potter books or the habit of personifying inanimate objects, I’ve embraced many of them anew. As with the flavor of caramelizing onions, there’s a special kind of depth and richness that only develops over time, and so I’ve found with the parts of myself that have been around since childhood.

Sharing nachos with Olivia introduced the feeling of security and connection I had eating them as a kid into the complexities of my adult life. But it was over a year later, when I started making nachos myself and developing the one, very particular way I like to do it, that I felt the full power of re-relating to of my childhood as an adult.

The nachos I make these day give me the same sense of fun as the ones I ate as a kid, but part of the delight of making them is what a serious undertaking the process is: I feel that I am not just cooking, but constructing a meal, an experience, that I’ll soon be sharing with friends, as we deconstruct the nachos together.

I begin, of course, by caramelizing onions. Then I stew black and pinto beans in stock, and maybe some beer, with garlic, bay leaves, cumin, coriander, oregano, and chipotles in adobo. I sauté poblanos and jalepeños, and at last it’s time to assemble. I spread chips across the largest baking sheet I can find and layer the beans, the onions, the peppers, salsa—usually from a jar—and cheddar and cotija cheese on top. When the nachos emerge from the oven, I top them with quick-pickled red onion and cilantro.

Feeding friends food I’ve cooked always feels good: there’s pride and satisfaction, hospitality and affection. But as I watched the nachos disappear from the sheet pan I set among the guests at a party I hosted recently, I felt something else, too: a harmony between whom I’m just now becoming and whom I’ve been for years and years, since the days when I drank orange-flavored seltzer and watched Scooby Doo.