State Fair of Texas, 2026 Big Tex Choice Awards Savory Finalist
A quesadilla folds. A melt gets buried.
This one skips the fold and buries the tortilla in crispy potato strings instead.
What This Thing Actually Is
A tortilla gets brushed in a seasoned butter oil and grilled until the outside turns crisp and golden. So far, that’s just a good quesadilla shell.
Then it gets packed with marinated chicken pastor, fire-roasted peppers, caramelized onions, smoky chipotle mayonnaise, a three-cheese blend, and crispy potato strings folded straight into the filling. It finishes under a drizzle of smoky chipotle crema on top.
A quesadilla that stopped being satisfied with just cheese and folded a bag of crunchy potato strings into the middle of itself.
Tony and Terry Bednar built it.
The Part That’s Actually Funny
A melt is supposed to be soft. That’s the entire appeal, warm cheese pulling apart, tortilla giving a little resistance and then folding.
This one refuses to stay soft all the way through.
The potato strings sit inside the filling like they’re daring the tortilla to be the crunchy part too.
Two different textures competing for the same job, in the same bite.
It made the 2026 savory finals alongside four other entries, out of a record 77 submissions from 46 concessionaires that had to clear at least two years working the Fair just to enter.
It didn’t take home Best Taste, Savory.
Burger Chop Tater Tacos did.
A crunchy tater tot shell beat a crunchy potato string filling. Texas judges apparently know exactly what texture they want and it’s tots.
Why Texas Keeps Doing This
Everything is bigger in Texas, including the argument over which part of the plate gets to be the crunchy part.
A regular quesadilla would have worked fine. Nobody would have complained.
Texas built the version that argues with itself over texture instead, because a fairgoer remembers the dish that surprised them, not the one that just did its job.
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