What do you think of this fact?
Nachos sound like a food category. They’re actually a person. The snack you dunk into cheese sauce at the movies is named after Ignacio Anaya, whose nickname was Nacho.
A closed town and a hungry table
The story goes back to 1943 and Piedras Negras, a small Mexican city near Fort Duncan, a U.S. military base in Texas. According to TIME, a group of about a dozen U.S. military wives had spent the day shopping in Eagle Pass and crossed over for dinner, only to find that the nearby restaurants were closed.
They ended up at the Victory Club, where Anaya worked as maître d’ (some accounts say chef). With no proper menu to offer, he cooked with what was left in the kitchen: he sliced and fried tortillas, covered the chips with shredded cheese and sliced jalapeños, and served them up.
The name was basically a signature
When the women asked what the dish was called, Anaya named it after himself: “Nachos Especiales.” Saveur tells the same origin story, with fried tortilla pieces, melted cheese and pickled jalapeño slices. No secret recipe, no food lab, just one guy improvising and putting his nickname on the result.
Anaya never got the rights to his idea. His son, Ignacio Anaya Jr., told a reporter that he had looked into helping his father claim ownership of the nacho in 1960, but it was too difficult. Anaya died in 1975. His son later owned a Nacho’s Restaurant in Piedras Negras and judged an annual nacho competition there on the second weekend of October.
Bonus fact: According to Saveur, nachos took off as stadium food at Arlington Stadium in Texas in the mid 1970s. That season, the stadium sold about one portion for every two and a half fans who came through the gates.
Today there’s even an International Day of the Nacho on October 21. So when you order a plate of nachos, you’re technically ordering a guy’s nickname with extra cheese.