Change. Hope. Nachos.

Another potato-based nacho experience came into my life last night at Tracy's Saloon in the Seward neighborhood. It was trivia time at Tracy's where the four of us on the team caught up with our lives and stunk up the room with our wrong guesses. Usually we do much better, I can only believe it must have been the nachos.

Tracy's uses the now omnipresent tater tot as the base for its version of nachos and calls them totchos. I'm only okay with that moniker, not thrilled. To the tots they add cheese (natch), tomatoes, lettuce and olives, unless you demand they not include the olives. Actually I demanded the olives be excluded but the totchos arrived hot at the table, dripping in black olives anyway. Thankfully my trivia pals picked them off for me, because I could not risk my delicate skin blistering from the touch of a wretched olive. Thank you, trivia pals. There is salsa and seasoned sour cream on the side of the totchos, which helps. The problem with them is the overfilling potato issue, of course, but also the cheese sort of melts into the tots so you can't really tell the cheese is there, and that's just tragic.

The totchos come with the option of ground beef as a topping for an additional cost, which I passed on. I assume it's spiced ground beef, like taco meat, but I really don't know, it wasn't spelled out. However, I don't feel that the soft texture of a tater tot (especially after the cheese melts into it) is well complemented by soft ground beef. It's just too much mush. Crisp tortilla chips are a much better foil for the meat. But I applaud Tracy's for taking a risk. I don't want to be one of those people who thinks there's only one way to make a dish. I love a classic guacamole, but there are lots of fun variations worth a try. The same goes for nachos. We need to be ready for anything and open to everything. If nachos have nothing else to teach us, at least remember this. Change. Hope. Nachos.