Last Call: Nacho Tables And Other Excessive Buffet Concepts
When it comes to food-related TikTok videos, Aimee Levitt always spots the best ones. Today, she wrote about two new trends in viral food phenomena: "Cloud Bread" and "Nacho Tables." The first of these is kind of whatever—a meringue-adjacent concoction that bakes up prettier than it tastes—but a Nacho Table? I could not stop thinking about the Nacho Table.
Here it is again, for those who might have missed it:
@stefherder we always make a nacho table during family vacation 🧀🌮 #DontLeaveMe #MakeSomeoneSmile #nachotable #foryou #puremichigan #vacation #family
This strikes me as a humbler version of the utterly out-of-control "enormous charcuterie spread" trend that has been popping up at weddings and other big expensive shindigs in recent years. Not that charcuterie isn't delicious—and you can assemble it from very inexpensive components!—but it's one of those Instagram-era trends where the image of abundance seems like the end in itself, rather than a means to the end of, y'know, actually feeding enough people to justify that kind of excess.
A Nacho Table, though? Its abundance comes primarily in the form of tortilla chips, which we eat by the family-size-bagful anyway. I don't want to think about the proportion of chips that I alone would happily eat off that spread, let alone all the people I'd have helping me out. To be sure, a Nacho Table is still aiming for the same aesthetic pocket as a big-ass charcuterie spread or a three-tiered chocolate fountain: it's got the WOW factor, and that's the point. But the decidedly unglamorous image of everyone crouched over the Nacho Table scooping up all the fully loaded chips is one that I delight in picturing in my mind's eye, and I don't think I'll get a full night's sleep until I try one for myself.
And why stop at Nacho Tables? What else can be given the Table treatment? There are lots of things I could eat in this kind of volume (or surface area). Maybe a worms and dirt table, with oceans of gummi-worm-punctuated pudding and scattered Oreo crumble. Or a popcorn table doused in clarified butter with an array of available seasoned salts. Lend your powerful brains to this exercise, for I cannot think of any thought experiment more deserving.