Do you believe in kismet? Here I sat, pondering which nachos I should write about on this day while I looked through my gallery of unwritten nachos. One little beauty caught my eye, a pretty little thing covered in pulled chicken. I knew it was from Red Rock Grill & Bar in Upton, MA. I knew I had written about their excellent breakfast nachos before. I searched the ol’ Nachonomics for my previous review and saw that EXACTLY TWO YEARS AGO TODAY I reviewed their breakfast nachos. It can be nothing but fate that today I review their regular nachos.

I have a horrifying and shameful secret to reveal: sometimes when I eat spicy food my tum tum hurts. There used to be a time when I was known as “The Cast-Iron Stomach” and could eat a whole platter of Buffalo Calamari with a side of jalapenos any time of day without a second thought, but those days are long over. Now if I want to think about eating nachos after 8 pm I better have some Tums ready because my guts are going to be an acid bath. I thought they’d be ok if I went to The Compass Tavern for lunch, but then I saw their nachos.

If you were to name a city in honor of someone named John Mason, you would think it would be called Masonville, Masonburg, Masontown, or something along those lines. However in New Hampshire they called it Portsmouth, because Mason had been the captain of the port of Portsmouth, England, in the county Hampshire, which is where the state got its name. It seems more likely that Mason was a bit of a dick and nobody really wanted to name the city after him so they made up an elaborate lie about how Portsmouth totally is based off of him, I swear. Anyhow, The Friendly Toast is a restaurant there, and that’s what we’re talking about today.

Every region of the united States has its own preferred version of, “Applebee's, but for Mexican food”. Cantina Mariachi, Chi-Chi's, Chilis, Don Pablo's, El Fenix, El Torito, On The Border, all these meet that definition in casual Mexican dining world. In New England we have Margaritas, and boy oh boy did I drink a lot of their namesake there in college. What I did not do though was sample their nachos with the same gusto, and that needed to be rectified.