Navigating Dallas' best mac and cheese dishes was hard work. (Editor's note: He's a food critic. It's all relative.) Any dish that leverages an ingredient as great as cheese sufficiently to put it in the title is usually going to be decent, and many of the versions I tried were stellar. There was one version, however, that gave me pause.
I'd just tried NHS Tavern's mac and cheese, crusted with big frumpy cheetos, and the bar had grown so crowded that evening that I decided to shoot across the street for a drink I could enjoy in peace. Inside the Hacienda on Henderson, the crowd had already waned and tables were available. Chips and salsa hit the deck moments after sitting, and I checked out the late-night menu. And whaddya know: they had mac and cheese here, too, though this is unlike any rendition I've ever encountered.
It comes in the form of a late-night chimichanga, and it's an all-out, gustatory shit show. It could be that I'd already had dinner on top of a heavy lunch, and now, late at night, I was far from hungry. But more than likely it was an absolute cheese overload that made me frightened by this dish. I could barely put a dent in it.
Creamy jalapeno-laced mac and cheese, wrapped in a flour tortilla, deep fried and then topped with runny cheese sauce -- this was drunk food of the highest order. In fact, I'm pretty sure the inventor of the dish was drunk when he came up with the idea.
The cheese orgy costs $8,. The anti-statins you'll need afterward cost extra.