Nachos Are My Favorite Food and These 12 Recipes Made Me Love Them Even More

If by chance I got to heaven and realized there were no nachos, I’d ask to be reassigned somewhere more fun. As a food journalist, I’m often asked what my favorite dish is, and I don’t even have to think about it: nachos. 

In July 1989, Michael McLaughlin — the chef, restaurateur, coauthor of the seminal Silver Palate Cookbook, and sole author of the era-defining The New American Kitchen — wrote a Food & Wine feature called “Nachos: Good & Gooey.” In it, he side-eyed the accepted 1940s lore of maitre d’ Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya improvising a dish for a group of off-hours customers at Victory Club in the Mexican city of Piedras Negras (McLaughlin referred simply to an unnamed restaurateur).

“Anyone who’s ever worked in a Southwestern kitchen will know right away that this story is bunk, since with beans, cheese, chiles, and tortillas on hand, improvising some hot, crisp, and gooey snack from them is practically automatic,” he wrote. “It’s pretty hard to give credence to the notion that several thousand years of North American civilization passed before nachos occurred to this guy in a panic. Some ideas are just too good to wait that long.” 

McLaughlin continued, “I think it more likely that the elemental notion of nachos, and the way to assemble them, and the immediately pleasurable social action they inspire (not to mention the scraping of cheese off the plate) are generically encoded in our DNA. Shortly after the first early man felt like ‘a little something’ with drinks before dinner, nachos were born.”

Amusing (if dismissive), but nachos didn’t just spring fully formed from the head of a benevolent and snacky deity. In 2020, writer, La Frontera host, and Tinfoil Swans guest Pati Jinich delved into the Mexican, Texan, and Tex-Mex origins of nachos with more scholarly aplomb for a New York Times feature positing nachos as an edible example of how fluid border cuisines can be. She cited the guidelines for Piedras’ annual International Nacho Festival, which declare that all entries must contain tortilla chips, a chile, and large quantities of melted cheese, and added one more criterion: “Nachos need to be messy, saucy, and provoke that ‘I can’t have just one’ feeling when you take a bite.”

While I am perfectly content with a composed plate of chips, cheese, and jalapeño slices, Jinich is — as always — correct. The glorious goo, textural intrigue, and borderline too-muchness is part of the inherent thrill of a great plate of nachos, and these recipes from culinary superstars like Andrew Zimmern, Kristen Kish, Hugh Acheson, our own Chandra Ram and Paige Grandjean, and for, some reason, actor Colin Hanks (though seriously, his recipe is a banger) highlight just why nachos transcend boundaries, borders, and any sense of personal restraint.