There are certain sensations you don’t realize belong to an era until they’re gone: the modem’s electronic shriek as it connected to the internet, the satisfying clack of a landline receiver, the little metallic weight of an arcade token in your palm. Lately, I’ve been wondering if the basket of free chips and salsa — dropped almost ceremonially onto the table before anyone has ordered a thing — might eventually join them.
At El Nopal, a regional Mexican chain my family has frequented for years, the opening minutes of dinner follow a familiar choreography. We slide into a pleather booth beneath burnt-orange walls and televisions playing Spanish-language fútbol. Half the table orders Diet Coke, the other water with lemon; someone requests a skillet of molten white queso. Then come the chips: hot, sturdy, generously salted, piled into black woven baskets alongside ramekins of fire-engine-red mild salsa and a darker, spicier version flecked with onion and jalapeño.
For our family of six, there are always two baskets, dividing the table into loose territories. Those seated in the middle are expected to choose a side; reaching from both feels vaguely lawless. Everyone has a salsa ritual. Mine is two-thirds spicy, one-third mild. My sister mixes the mild with queso until it turns a muted pink. One of my brothers splashes vinegary house hot sauce into the spicy. Soon the menus are stacked, the pebbled Coke cups are sweating rings onto the table and somebody is pointing with a chip while saying, “No, no, tell her the part about —”
The Trump administration has made that little ritual more expensive to maintain.
In July 2025, the administration withdrew from a long-standing agreement governing fresh tomatoes imported from Mexico and imposed a 17.09% antidumping duty on most of them. The Commerce Department said the move was intended to counter Mexican tomatoes being sold in the United States at unfair prices and protect domestic growers.
Then the weather got bad.
Poor conditions in Mexico and Florida further reduced supplies, and tomato prices climbed to their highest level in roughly two decades. Dante Galeazzi, president of the Texas International Produce Association, told Houston Public Media that at one point the fresh tomato market had jumped to about $80 a box. Grocery stores began backing away from tomatoes earlier in the year; restaurants, he said, held on longer.
There is only so much a restaurant can absorb.
“The challenge is for our Texas restaurants, they operate on very narrow profit margins in what I would call good economic times,” Kelsey Erickson Streufert, chief public affairs officer for the Texas Restaurant Association, told the publication.
These are not, she continued, particularly good economic times for running a restaurant. Food is more expensive, but so are labor, utilities, insurance and credit card swipe fees — virtually everything required to keep the doors open. Eventually, the arithmetic gets down to the ramekin.
“You have restaurants that are simply saying, ‘Look, I can’t afford to put salsa on the tables anymore,’” Galeazzi said. “What are consumers going to do? Where are consumers going to find this relief?”
The tragedy of a $4 basket of chips is obviously not the $4. It is the moment someone at the table inevitably says, “Eh, do we need these today?” Sometimes the answer will be yes. Some days undoubtedly call for acid, salt and crunch. On other days, maybe you skip them. You wait patiently for the entrées. The stories still get told. Someone finds a plastic straw to point with instead.
It’s fine.
But the texture of the wait is different.
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That small decision — chips or no chips — moves the diner almost imperceptibly from guest to customer. The thing that once arrived as part of the welcome now joins the same mental ledger as everything else: Drinks? An appetizer? Queso? Dessert? Do we need it? Is it worth it? Should we just save the money?
People sometimes joke online about whether you grew up in an “appetizers and drinks” family or an “entrées and water” family. It is a joke, mostly, about the invisible financial rules children learn at restaurants: what counts as normal, what counts as a treat and what you know better than to ask for.
Part of the appeal of the neighborhood Americanized Mexican restaurant has long been that it offers a particularly accessible kind of abundance. You can order an inexpensive combination plate and a soda, or water with a squeeze of lime, eat something hot and filling and deeply flavorful, and be out the door in 45 minutes without anybody making you feel strange about any of it.
And while you wait, you get the same chips as the table ordering margaritas.
Free chips briefly flatten the distinction between the appetizers-and-drinks family and the entrées-and-water family. Everybody gets to start with something.
Of course, restaurants cannot run on symbolism.
The “free” things on the table have never actually been free to them. Somebody bought the tomatoes. Somebody fried the chips. Somebody washed the ramekins and refilled the baskets. Hospitality has always had scaffolding beneath it; ideally, the guest simply doesn’t spend much time looking at it.
Lately, that scaffolding has become harder for restaurants to hide.
One of my favorite Chicago breakfast spots recently changed the way it serves Texas toast. Two slices had been the default for years. Now the waiter asks: Do you actually want two, or would one be enough? They were happy to bring two, he explained. But a lot of second slices were coming back uneaten, and they simply couldn’t afford to keep throwing them away. It is difficult to begrudge a restaurant that calculation. In fact, the question struck me as a rather thoughtful solution: Have as much toast as you want. Just tell us you want it first.
But it also made visible, for a moment, the financial scaffolding behind the plate.
That is what interests me about the chips and salsa, too. Not that restaurant owners are becoming less generous, but that the economic forces pressing on them increasingly require them to show their work.
Trade policy tends to arrive in public dressed in abstraction: percentages, agreements, investigations, duties, markets. Then someone opens an invoice. A tomato costs more. A batch of salsa costs more. The complimentary appetizer that was once cheap enough to disappear into the cost of doing business becomes expensive enough to notice. Eventually, somebody has to decide whether hospitality can continue to absorb it.
And then, one night, a server has to ask if you would like to add chips.
This is a mundane outcome of economic policy — almost comically so. No one’s dinner is destroyed. No one sits staring mournfully at the bare lacquered table. There is simply a small patch of negative space where something automatic used to happen.
But small gestures are often where hospitality lives.
The loss of free chips and salsa isn’t really about chips and salsa. It is about what happens when policy decisions force restaurants to make the scaffolding of their hospitality more visible — when a gesture designed to make guests forget about the transaction becomes part of the transaction itself. At El Nopal, when the baskets arrive, nobody asks who is paying for this round. Nobody pauses to determine whether everyone wants enough chips to justify them. Nobody calculates how hungry they are with their entrée still twenty minutes away.
Someone tells a story. Someone interrupts to improve the punchline. Someone else points across the table with a tortilla chip. And everyone reaches into the basket without asking.
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