Mexican American Mexican

I don’t pay too much attention to Google Doodles. Don’t get me wrong, they’re certainly charming, but my need to search for something else generally takes precedence over interacting with the illustration on my search page. But today, Google got my attention.

Today, I opened my web browser and was greeted by an animated illustration of a man making nachos.

Yes, nachos.

I’d already heard the story that a man named Nacho invented nachos in a border town restaurant in Mexico as a way of placating hungry customers, but I was surprised that he was being honored with a Google Doodle—the online equivalent of having a monument raised in your honor.

Don’t get me wrong, the doodle made by Alfonso de Anda is wonderful. Moreover, I like nachos just fine and I’m sure that Mr. Nacho Anaya García was a lovely man. It’s just that since moving to Mexico, I haven’t had any good nachos—except for the ones I make myself. Unlike in the US, where you can find fairly decent nachos on the menus of many casual restaurants and sports bars, here in Mexico, nachos are what you buy when you go the movies. Or when you’ve been drinking and you walk past a convenience store and are in desperate need for empty calories.

In Mexico, nachos are almost always served like this: first, you have to open your own bag of tortilla chips and dump them into the tiny plastic tray with three compartments: one for chips and two others for whatever you want to fill them with. (In my case, pickled jalapeños.) Then, you have to pump your own cheese from a plastic dispenser filled with lukewarm cheesy goop the color of disappointment. If you’re lucky, there will be enough to generously cover your chips; more likely, you’ll have to smack the pump repeatedly so that you can decorate your chips with the last remaining globs of orange that you have wrung from the machine.

And obviously, when you take your first bite, the cheese will dribble onto your shirt, leaving a greasy reminder of your unsatisfying snack.

Keep in mind that these movie theatre nachos have been worked over by a food stylist before being photographed and photoshopped, and yet they still provoke sadness.

What I never realized about Google Doodles until today, is that you can access all of the doodles in an archive. This is how I learned that the nacho doodle is not the first time that Mexican food has been celebrated. On September 16, 2014—Mexican Independence Day—the Google Doodle featured an illustration of a chile en nogada, a feat of gastronomic alchemy in which a poblano chile is stuffed with spiced ground beef, glazed with a walnut cream sauce and sprinkled with pomegranate seeds.

Mexico’s Google Doodle on September 16, 2014

The chile en nogada doodle was only programmed to appear on Google’s Mexico website. The nacho doodle, on the other hand, appeared today in Mexico and 18 other countries around the world. Of course, it appeared in the US, but also in Venezuela, Argentina, Germany, Slovakia and…Vietnam.

They eat nachos in Vietnam?

I had to find out for myself. So I returned to Google and entered two search words, only to learn that the Vietnamese eat nachos at the movies too.

Apparently, bad nachos are also a thing in Vietnamese movie theatres.