La Cumbre, on Valencia at 16th, is the kind of place people tell visitors to San Francisco to go to get some "real Mission Mexican." Heck, it's the sort of place we can imagine bringing out-of-town folks ourselves, in an effort to show them the world beyond our late, lamented (for the booze and sentimental reasons, not the food) Chi-Chi's. In fact, the smartest folks we know -- that is, SFist Interview subjects -- frequently call out La Cumbre as "best burrito." And maybe it is, but their nachos suck total ass.

After a night out with friends at the Elbo Room we stumbled up Valencia to La Cumbre. We felt a need for melted cheese, so the menu's prominent placement of the "deluxe nachos" seemed like a sign from the Lord. Or was it from the devil himself? We're voting Satan, because when we got our nachos they were covered not in melted cheddar or jack or anything natural -- no, it was covered with PUMP CHEESE.

We looked around to make sure we hadn't died and gone back to Indiana, but, no, we were still in lovely San Francisco. And we weren't at a bowling alley or at Taco Bell or at the Metreon or anywhere else we might have expected to get pump cheese -- we were in La Cumbre, a Mexican restaurant of no small repute.

We watched as they made plate after plate of nachos with the same devilish disdain for all that's holy, ladling that yellow, plastic gunk over perfectly innocent chips and salsa. And it's not like they were out of real cheese, either: our companion's quesadilla contained melted, normal cheese. It was just the nachos that got the steaming gunk treatment. We tried to think of a way to return the nachos, but since that seemed like the way that they made them, it's not like we could claim defect, so we sadly crunched and slurped and just felt mad.

If we had been at a high school basketball game or something we wouldn't have been outraged in the slightest, but to receive cheese that was "dispensed" instead of shredded and melted at La Cumbre -- La Cumbre, people -- really blew our mind. That just ain't right.