There are some feelings you don’t realize belong to a certain era until they’re gone: the electronic scream of a modem connecting to the Internet, the satisfying click of a landline receiver, the metallic weight of an arcade token in the palm of your hand. Lately, I’ve been wondering whether the free basket of chips and salsa — which is ceremonially placed on the table almost before anyone orders anything — will eventually join their ranks.
At El Nopal, a regional Mexican chain my family has frequented for years, the start of dinner follows a familiar routine. We slipped into a faux-leather booth with burnt orange walls and Spanish-language soccer playing on the TV. Half the table ordered Diet Coke, the other half lemonade; someone asked for a pot of molten white cheese. Next up are the chips: hot, firm, generously salted, piled in a black woven basket alongside ramekins of fire-engine red mild salsa, as well as a darker, spicier version with onions and jalapeños.
For our family of six, there are always two baskets dividing the table into loose areas. The person sitting in the middle should choose one side; the contact between the two gives a vague sense of lawlessness. Everyone has a salsa ritual. Two thirds of mine was spicy and one third was mild. My sister mixed the mild cheese with cheese until it turned a soft pink. One of my brothers poured vinegar into the hot sauce. Soon, menus were stacked, Coke cups on the cobblestones hung with sweat on the tables, and someone pointed with a chip at the part that said, “No, no, tell her about—”
The Trump administration has made such small rituals more expensive to maintain.
In July 2025, the U.S. government withdrew from a long-term agreement on the import of fresh tomatoes from Mexico and imposed an anti-dumping tax of 17.09% on most of those tomatoes. The U.S. Commerce Department said the move was aimed at combating unfair prices for Mexican tomatoes sold in the U.S. and to protect domestic growers.
Then the weather turned bad.
Poor conditions in Mexico and Florida further reduced supplies, with tomato prices climbing to their highest levels in about two decades. Dante Galeazzi, president of the International Produce Association of Texas, told Houston Public Media that the market for fresh tomatoes jumped to about $80 per box at one point. Earlier this year, grocery stores stopped selling tomatoes. Restaurants will survive longer, he said.
There’s only so much a restaurant can absorb.
“The challenge for our restaurants in Texas is that in what I would call a good economy, their profit margins are very tight,” Kelsey Erickson Streufert, chief public affairs officer for the Texas Restaurant Association, told the publication.
She continued that these are not particularly good economic times to run a restaurant. Food is more expensive, but so are labor, utilities, insurance and credit card swipes — pretty much everything you need to keep the doors open. Ultimately, arithmetic involves ramekins.
“Some restaurants are simply saying, ‘Listen, I’m never going to put salsa on the table again,'” Galleazzi said. “What will consumers do? Where will consumers find that relief?”
The tragedy of the $4 basket of chips is obviously not $4. At this point, people at the dinner table inevitably say, “Well, do we need these today?” Sometimes the answer is yes. Some days definitely call for acid, salt, and crunch. On other days, maybe you skip them. You wait patiently for the main course. These stories are still told. Someone found a plastic straw instead.
It doesn’t matter.
But the waiting process is different.
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This small decision—fries or no fries—almost imperceptibly transforms a diner from a guest to a customer. What once arrived as part of the welcome is now added to the same mental ledger as everything else: drinks? Appetizer? Queso? dessert? Do we need it? Is it worth it? Should we just save money?
People sometimes joke online about whether you grew up in an “appetizer and drink” household or an “entrée and water” household. It’s mostly a joke about the intangible financial rules kids learn in restaurants: what counts as normal, what counts as a treat, and what you know not to ask for.
Part of the appeal of the neighborhood Tex-Mex restaurant has long been the abundance of food it offers in a particularly accessible way. You can order a cheap combo plate and a soda or water with lemon juice, eat something hot, filling, and tangy, and be out the door in 45 minutes without anyone weirding you out.
While you wait, you get the same chips as you order margaritas at the table.
The free chips briefly narrowed the gap between the appetizers and drinks lineup and the entrées and water lineup. Everyone starts with something.
Of course, restaurants can’t run on tokenism.
The “free” stuff on the desktop is never really free to them. Someone bought tomatoes. Someone fries. Someone cleaned the ramekins and refilled the baskets. The hospitality industry always has scaffolding underneath it. Ideally, guests won’t spend too much time looking at it.
Lately, it’s become increasingly difficult for restaurants to hide this scaffolding.
One of my favorite Chicago breakfast spots recently changed the way they serve Texas toast. Two slices have been the default for years. Now the waiter asked: Do you really want two, or is one enough? He explained that they were happy to take two. But many of the second slices came back uneaten and they simply couldn’t keep throwing them away. It’s hard to begrudge the restaurant this kind of calculation. In fact, this question strikes me as a rather thoughtful solution: Eat as much toast as you want. Please tell us you want it first.
But it also temporarily exposed the financial scaffolding behind the sector.
This is also where I get interested in chips and salsa. It’s not that restaurateurs have become less generous, but looming economic pressure increasingly demands that they showcase their work.
Trade policy often appears to the public in abstract terms: percentages, agreements, investigations, tariffs, markets. Then someone writes an invoice. Tomatoes are more expensive. A batch of salsa costs more. Free appetizers that were once cheap enough to disappear into the cost of doing business have become expensive enough to attract attention. Ultimately, someone has to decide whether hospitality can continue to absorb it.
Then, one night, the server has to ask you if you want to add chips.
This is a mundane—almost laughable—result of economic policy. No one’s dinner was ruined. No one sat and stared sadly at the bare lacquered table. There was just a little bit of negative space where something used to happen automatically.
But it’s the small gestures that often reveal the spirit of hospitality.
The loss of free chips and salsa wasn’t really about the chips and salsa. It’s about what happens when policy decisions force restaurants to make the scaffolding of their hospitality more visible, when gestures designed to make guests forget about the deal become part of the deal itself. At El Nopal, when the basket arrived, no one asked who paid for the round. No one stopped to determine whether everyone wanted enough chips to justify their actions. With the main course still twenty minutes away, no one calculated how hungry they were.
Someone tells a story. Someone interrupts to improve the humor. Others pointed cornflakes across the table. Everyone puts their hand in the basket without asking.
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