I'm gradually discovering that every culture has its own "stupid chips meal". (Note to Americans: he's British, he's referring to fries.)
In the UK we love a chip butty (chips in bread), and we struggle to justify it. But there are many other hard-to-justify dishes hiding out there. So far I've got this list, which looks to me like a pattern:
- UK: chip butty. Chips in bread. Chip sandwich. Chips in pitta. A bit basic.
- CA: poutine. A rather famous dish of chips and cheese curds topped with gravy.
- NL: kapsalon. Invented in 2003 (?) by a Dutch barber (?), it's now famous in the country: chips topped with salad, cheese, meat and sauce.
- BE: mitraillette. A chip butty with meat and sauce.
- FR: tacos français. It's hard to believe that the French could achieve possibly the stupidest version. This one manages to also trample all over the noble tex-mex lineage of the taco. The French "tacos" (spelt with an "s" even in the singular -- see how trashy?) is apparently a flour tortilla, but stuffed with chips, cheese, meat, and more. It's not at all reminiscent of a taco, just a cheap chips wrap. ... Oh and -- it's not even good.
- PT: ovos rotos. "Messy eggs" or "broken eggs" -- chips topped with fried eggs, ham (probably) and a mess of other stuff.
- IE: spice bag, allegedly invented in 2008 in a Dublin Chinese restaurant, and involving chips, peppers, chillies, chicken, & fried onions?
- ZA: kota, a hollowed-out bread stuffed with chips, meat (often sausage), cheese, mango pickle. (This one has an interesting history - see the link - apparently as an equivalent of the Cornish pasty, a portable lunch for miners.)
An emergent phenomenon. Chips with some or all of bread, cheese, meat, gravy, i.e. some protein and some sauce. Unhealthy, un-refined, un-pretty.
How far does this continue?