You may have noticed something brewing lately: A new crop of restaurants and pop-ups is serving food that’s not just “fusion,” but also aggressive, weird, troll-y, chaotic fusion that’s actually... good. On its surface, this new chaotic cousin is born of a desire to shake off a few rules. There is cheeseburger arancini, Big Mac pizza, pastrami tacos, tandoori spaghetti, masala cheesesteaks, and biscuit and gravy pierogies. There’s cajun red beans and rice nachos and chorizo and queso on popcorn. This is not the fusion of cooking Italian cuisine with Japanese technique. These are big, gooey, macho menus that sound like four cuisines were stuck in the Large Hadron Collider on a dare. This is chaos cooking. And its practitioners just want everyone to lighten the hell up about food. Chaotic is wild and weird in a way that inspires a barking laugh in joyful disbelief. Chaos is the opposite of composure, which sounds like rules and order and boredom. Chaos represents a freedom from standards of aesthetic perfection and authenticity. As a wise steakhouse once said: No rules, just right. Tap the link in our bio to read more.