Picos offers pandemic comfort with perfect plate of Nachos Jorge
In music, the phenomenon of perseveration is the snippet of song you just can’t shake, the tune that pops into your head and won’t go away.
I suffer from the culinary version.
Certain Houston dishes I’ve grown to love just barge into my consciousness at the oddest intervals: on the edge of sleep; in the middle of a Zoom meeting; at the kitchen sink; while hunting for a stray sock.
Inevitably, the moment comes when I can no longer ignore the siren song. I must have the dish in question. I must have it now.
That’s what brought me to the covered front patio at Picos on a recent sunny weekday midafternoon, where I sat in solitary, stress-free splendor. Friends had told me days before they’d had a happy interlude there, involving margaritas and social distance and fresh-air ventilation, and that’s when the perseveration about Nachos Jorge kicked in.
Nachos Jorge and I go way, way back. I fixated upon them back in the 1980s, at chef Arnaldo Richards’ first, groundbreak
ing restaurant out on Bellaire Boulevard. Served in a pile jumping with twists of Picos’ signature cochinta pibil — the marinated Yucatecan pork cooked in banana leaves — those offbeat Nachos Jorge were my first intimation that nachos could be something more than the familiar cheese, bean, jalapeño and groundbeef staple of midcentury Texas.
Pickled red onions, the traditional cochinita pibil go-along, snaked through the Nachos Jorge pile, colliding with guacamole and pickled jalapeño wheels and refried black beans, another Yucatecan touch. The cheese was white instead of the usual orange. The meat was in pulled strings instead of crumbles, or the beef fajita chunks only just starting to make their mark on the Texas nacho genre.
Those Nachos Jorge were a glorious mess to eat. I’ve always leaned toward individually composed nachos as my favorite form of the dish — I know, I know, we could argue composed versus piled all day — but I made an exception for my friend Jorge.
So I was startled to find that Picos is now serving Nachos Jorge in composed form, each carefully assembled tortilla chip fanned out like a magenta-andpale- green blossom on the plate, with just the right ratio of achiote-daubed pork to guac to beans to cheese to onion to chile in each bite.
I like them even better that way.
And yes, my ritual accompaniment — Picos’ landmark Perfect Margarita, Houston’s introduction to the purist, straight-up shaker style of our civic cocktail — remains a thing of simple beauty.
My compulsion was satisfied. At least for the time being.