Tex-Mex
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49 free Tex-Mex trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Tex-Mex is the cooking of the Tejano people of South Texas, built on Mexican traditions and reshaped by ranch beef, flour tortillas, yellow cheese and cumin brought by Canary Islanders. For a century it was simply what people ate on both sides of the Rio Grande; the hyphenated name did not reach print as a food label until 1960, and it took Diana Kennedy's 1972 cookbook to draw a line between it and the cuisines of Mexico. These 49 questions cover the dishes and where they came from: the nachos Ignacio Anaya improvised for officers' wives in Piedras Negras, the skirt-steak fajitas that went sizzling at the Round-Up Restaurant in Pharr, the chimichanga a Tucson cook swore at, chile con queso, Frito pie in the bag, breakfast burritos and the San Antonio chili queens whose stew became the state dish of Texas. There are questions on the margarita's rival origin stories, the railway that first used the word TexMex, and the film that made Paris crave tequila and chili. Every answer is cited to the page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Tex-Mex standard did the Original Mexican Restaurant pioneer in Texas from 1900?
The combination plate
The combination plate began as 'the Regular'. Chicago-born Otis Farnsworth had seen Anglos queuing at Mexican-owned eateries, so he put enchiladas, tamales, rice and beans on one plate for them, and restaurants across Texas copied him.
Q 02Which people's cooking is Tex-Mex cuisine built on?
Tejanos
Tejanos are Texans of Mexican descent; the food is a subtype of Southwestern cuisine.
Q 03Which spice is used far more in Tex-Mex than in Mexican cooking?
Cumin
Cumin runs all through Tex-Mex, from chili powder to enchilada gravy. The heavy hand with it is traced to Canary Islanders whom Spain sent to settle Texas.
Q 04Which tortilla type is characteristic of Tex-Mex rather than most Mexican cooking?
Flour
Flour tortillas took over Texas kitchens in the 1930s, when wheat flour became easy to buy: they are far quicker to make at home than corn ones. Mexico City never made the switch.
Q 05Where is the world's first frozen margarita machine, built for a Dallas restaurant in 1971, now kept?
The Smithsonian
The Smithsonian took it in 2005. Mariano Martinez had wanted a 7-Eleven Slurpee machine for his overworked bar; refused one, he rebuilt a secondhand soft-serve ice cream machine instead.
Q 06In which Mexican border town were nachos invented?
Piedras Negras
Piedras Negras faces Eagle Pass, Texas, across the Rio Grande, and it was visitors from the Texas side who first ate the dish. The city has since put up a bronze plaque to its inventor and declared an annual Day of the Nacho.
Q 07Nacho, the nickname behind nachos, is short for which Spanish name?
Ignacio
Ignacio Anaya, Nacho to everyone, named his improvised snack 'Nachos especiales' after himself. Dictionary-makers puzzled over the word until 1988, when a Mexican-born librarian told an Oxford researcher what the nickname meant.
Q 08Anaya first made nachos in the 1940s for which hungry customers?
Army wives
Army wives from the American base across the river turned up when no cook could be found, so Anaya melted cheese and sliced pickled peppers over fried tortilla pieces himself. A church cookbook printed his recipe in 1954.
Q 09Traditional South Texas barbacoa is made from which part of the cow?
The head
The head: barbacoa de cabeza grew out of ranch life, where Mexican cowhands were paid partly in the parts of the animal their bosses did not want, and made the most of them.
Q 10At which ballpark were 'ballpark nachos' with cheese sauce first sold in the 1970s?
Arlington Stadium
Arlington Stadium's concession operators feared the new snack would eat into popcorn sales. It did the opposite: the peppers' heat sent fans back for drinks, and takings rose across the stand.
Q 11Which sportscaster's on-air enthusiasm for nachos in 1978 spread the dish nationwide?
Howard Cosell
Howard Cosell was handed a plate in the Monday Night Football booth, took a liking to the name and kept working 'nachos' into his commentary for weeks. A Texas stadium snack became a national one.
Q 12Which candy once came with dinner at nearly every Mexican restaurant in Texas?
Pecan pralines
Pecan pralines, or a dish of sherbet, rounded off the dinner at no extra charge. The custom is traced to the street vendors who sold pecan candy and tamales in Texas cities from the 1880s.
Q 13Which cut of beef is the classic fajita meat?
Skirt steak
Q 21What is a chimichanga?
A deep-fried burrito
A deep-fried burrito, and Arizona restaurants still argue over who fried the first. One story is a kitchen accident, another a 1946 experiment in using up burritos that had not sold.
Q 22In which Arizona city is the chimichanga's US birthplace usually placed?
Tucson
Tucson has advertised itself as the 'home of the chimichanga', and its oldest Mexican restaurant, El Charro, tells the best-known origin story. A Phoenix rival dates its own claim to 1946.
Q 23The El Charro legend says Monica Flin shouted 'chimichanga' instead of what?
A Spanish profanity
Skirt steak was a cheap trimming until fajitas took off. By 1984 its price had jumped so sharply that a Texas A&M researcher set out to trace the dish that caused it.
Q 14The Spanish word faja, root of fajita, means what?
Strip or belt
Strip or belt: fajita is the diminutive, 'little strip', a ranch and butcher's word for a cut of beef long before it named a dish. The Spanish word goes back to the Latin fascia, a band.
Q 15Otilia Garza is credited with adding which signature touch to fajitas?
The sizzling plate
She got the idea from queso flameado served on cast iron in Acapulco, at her Round-Up Restaurant in Pharr.
Q 16Which Houston restaurant popularised the fajita from 1973?
Ninfa's
Ninfa's opened in 1973 on Houston's Navigation Boulevard, where Ninfa Laurenzo, raised in the Rio Grande Valley, grilled the beef of her childhood and called it an old family recipe. A restaurant empire followed.
Q 17Which West Texas ghost town has hosted a famous chili cook-off since 1967?
Terlingua
Terlingua, an abandoned mining camp near the Rio Grande, staged the first as a duel: a New York humorist had sneered at Texans' chili, so a Texas newspaperman cooked against him there. It ended in a tie.
Q 18Before the word 'fajitas' caught on, Houston diners in the 1970s ordered the dish as what?
Tacos al carbon
Tacos al carbon, 'charcoal tacos', was the menu name when a Houston restaurant made the grilled beef famous from 1973. The ranch word fajita took over only as the craze spread in the 1980s.
Q 19Which northern Mexican state gives its name to the white melting cheese of traditional queso?
Chihuahua
Chihuahua cheese, mild and white, melts into the northern Mexican dish that Texas queso echoes. Texans mostly switched to processed cheese, which stays smooth where natural cheese tends to clump.
Q 20Which processed cheese is the classic base of Tex-Mex queso?
Velveeta
Velveeta is engineered to melt smooth, which is why Texans stir it with a can of Ro-Tel tomatoes and green chiles for the standard home queso. Kraft has long advertised it for exactly that.
A Spanish profanity was halfway out, the family story goes, when Flin remembered the young nieces in her kitchen and swerved to 'chimichanga', a nonsense word along the lines of 'thingamajig'.
Q 24Frito pie is traditionally served in what?
The chip bag
The chip bag is split open and the chili, cheese and onion are piled straight onto the corn chips, so the snack needs no plate. Texas and New Mexico both claim to have thought of it first.
Q 25Which Santa Fe lunch counter is sometimes credited with the 'true' 1960s Frito pie?
Woolworth's
Woolworth's on the Santa Fe plaza is where Teresa Hernandez said she ladled red chili over Fritos in the 1960s. Texans counter that the mother of the man who launched Fritos was cooking with them decades earlier.
Q 26What do Midwesterners call their taco-meat version of the Frito pie?
Walking taco
Walking taco is the Midwest's name for the hand-held meal of fairs, tailgates and school cafeterias. Purists there draw a line: taco-seasoned beef makes it a walking taco, chili makes it a Frito pie.
Q 27Which snack was first made from leftover tortillas at Disneyland's Casa de Fritos restaurant?
Doritos
Doritos began as a way to use up tortillas the kitchen was throwing out: in the early 1960s they were cut up, fried and seasoned, guests loved them, and a Frito-Lay executive took the idea national.
Q 28Chili is the official state dish of Texas; which pepper is the official state pepper?
Jalapeño
Jalapeño won the title in a resolution that called it a 'delicious and indispensable staple of Texas cuisine'. Lawmakers later added a second, the tiny wild chiltepin, as the state's official native pepper.
Q 29The 'chili queens' who sold chili from casual stands were famous in which city?
San Antonio
San Antonio's chili queens set up open-air tables in the city's plazas from the 1880s. Locals and tourists crowded in, and the queens' fame helped give the city its reputation as the capital of Tex-Mex.
Q 30At which 1893 fair did a Texas chili stand give many Americans their first taste?
Columbian Exposition
The Columbian Exposition was Chicago's world's fair, and the chili stand there carried the dish's fame far beyond Texas. Around the same time a ready-mixed chili powder went on sale, so cooks anywhere could make it.