Or, How Many Ways Can You Fold a Tortilla?
Americans are gullible. I don’t mean that as an insult. I’m including myself in the accusation. We’ve been convinced that Mexican and Tex-Mex restaurants offer an astonishing variety of dishes, each with its own name, personality, and place on a menu that requires three pages and a translator to navigate.
But I’ve been doing some thinking.
Strip away the fancy names, the decorative lettuce, and the little plastic cup of sour cream, and what do you have?
A tortilla, some meat, and some cheese.
That’s it. That’s the entire business model.
Consider the taco. Take a tortilla, put meat and cheese in it, fold it in half, and charge somebody three dollars. Make the tortilla crunchy, and suddenly you’ve invented an entirely different menu category.
Now take that same tortilla, meat, and cheese, roll it up, and you’ve got a burrito. Apparently, the difference between a taco and a burrito is a couple of additional folds and a willingness to commit.
Pour sauce over the rolled-up tortilla, and congratulations, you’ve created an enchilada. Same basic ingredients, but now it’s wet, so naturally it deserves a different name.
Take the tortilla, meat, and cheese, fold it in half, and grill it until the cheese melts. That’s a quesadilla. We’ve essentially invented the Mexican grilled cheese sandwich, which, to be fair, is an excellent idea.
Put the whole arrangement in a deep fryer, and now it’s a chimichanga. We’ve taken a burrito, given it a hot oil bath, and somehow convinced ourselves we’ve discovered an entirely new food group.
And then there’s the tostada. Take the tortilla, leave it flat, pile the ingredients on top, and serve it with the expectation that the customer will figure out how to eat it without wearing half of it.
The truly remarkable thing is that restaurants have figured out how to charge different prices depending on what happens to the tortilla.
Fold it? One price.
Roll it? Another price.
Roll it and cover it in sauce? Add two dollars.
Deep-fry it? Premium pricing.
Leave it flat and let the customer deal with the consequences? That’s a specialty.
Of course, Mexican cuisine is far more diverse than this little observation suggests. There are regional traditions, different fillings, sauces, cooking techniques, and generations of culinary history. I’m not questioning any of that.
I’m questioning the American restaurant menu that manages to turn six combinations of essentially the same ingredients into forty-seven numbered dinner specials.
And the really clever part?
We’ll sit there studying that menu for fifteen minutes, trying to decide whether we want our meat and cheese folded, rolled, fried, or drowned in sauce.
Then we’ll order the combination platter.
Because apparently, we need three different configurations of the same ingredients on one plate to feel like we’ve experienced variety.
And I’ll probably order it again next Tuesday.
With extra cheese.
