Sit down at just about any Tex-Mex place in Dallas and a basket of warm chips hits the table before the server asks about drinks. There’s a bowl of salsa next to it. Nobody ordered either one, and nobody is going to put them on the check. Empty the basket and another one comes.
We take it for granted around here. The free basket hasn’t always been part of the deal, though, and the way it got here has more to do with the snack aisle than with tradition.
Ask a Texan of a certain age what showed up first at a Mexican restaurant and you’ll hear about tortillas. Warm ones, wrapped in a cloth or kept in a covered dish, with a few pats of butter on the side. Chips and hot sa
Sauce came along later.
Dallas has been eating Tex-Mex longer than most cities. El Fenix dates to 1918, when Mike Martinez, a former dishwasher at a downtown hotel, switched his McKinney Avenue café in Little Mexico over to the food he grew up with. The Martinez family ran it for 90 years before selling in 2008, and for a long time the restaurant’s chips and salsa have come from a sister company, Sunrise Mexican Foods.
Chips took over in the 1970s, once you could buy tortilla chips by the case. Some of that came from right here. Frito-Lay was based in Dallas when its product team finished Tostitos in 1978, and the chips were in stores across the country by around 1980.
For a restaurant owner, the math was easy. A bag of chips and a tub of salsa cost less than steaming tortillas to order and handing out butter, and chips don’t go cold on the table.
Chips are salty. Salt makes you thirsty. Thirsty customers order another margarita, and the bar is where a restaurant makes its money. That’s most of the answer right there.
The basket also keeps people busy while the kitchen works. A table with chips in front of it doesn’t watch the clock the way an empty table does.
And after this many decades, people expect it. A Tex-Mex restaurant in Texas that suddenly charged for chips would hear about it from its regulars by the end of the first night.
Where the Basket Is Worth the Drive
Plenty of places hand out chips. A few make you look forward to them.
Ojeda’s on Maple Avenue has been family-run since Ben and Cecilia Ojeda took over an old grill on the corner of Maple and Lucas in 1969. Ben had cooked for soldiers in the Army during World War II, and his kids grew up working the kitchen. The salsa has a tart, bright edge, and the chips keep coming as long as you’re sitting there.
Mia’s on Lemmon Avenue opened in 1981, started by Ana “Mama Mia” Enriquez and her husband, Tiburcio “Butch” Enriquez. The red salsa there has real heat, and the baskets show up fast and often. Tom Landry was a regular.
Gloria’s, which got its start as a small Salvadoran and Tex-Mex café in Oak Cliff, goes one step further. Along with the chips and salsa, every table gets a bowl of creamy black bean dip at no charge. A lot of Dallas regulars will tell you the bean dip is the real reason they go.
And El Fenix, still the oldest name in the game here, has been putting chips and salsa on Dallas tables for longer than almost anyone.
Food costs jumped during the pandemic and never really came back down, and some restaurants around the state have started charging for chips and salsa, or at least for the second basket.Others have gotten creative, waiving the charge once a table spends a certain amount on food.
Dallas hasn’t followed along much. At the places most of us grew up eating, the basket is still free and the refills still come without asking. Order the second margarita anyway. That’s how it stays that way.
