Sometimes piling on is a bad thing. In football it can get you penalized.

Sometimes it’s a good thing, like when you pile four different meats and shellfish on a tortilla and flip the lid.

Likewise, breaking from culinary tradition is often frowned upon. Try ordering cappuccino in the afternoon at an Italian trattoria – one that doesn’t pander to tourists. But more often than not, straying from custom works.

Take the Quesadilla Lazcano at Dos Arcos in Mexico, a large tortilla overflowing with chicken, beef, chorizo and shrimp. It’s like a choir on a plate, though not a lofty, ethereal chorus, but one in the throes of warming up their voices.

The flavors stutter, scatter and build, so you know something interesting is to follow – an earthy tremor of red meat, the husky rasp of chorizo, the even calm from strips of chicken, a dusky spice that pricks the palate and the sweet-smoky note played by shrimp blackened on the grill.

This is cacophony in all its glory. One bite can swell with earthy heat. The next finds a brusque bite. Or perhaps the delicate savor of shrimp, with a haze of bittersweet char floating above.

Here nuance isn’t necessary. The quesadilla has a swagger – a big, bold combination that works.

It’s a lot to take in, and there’s a lot of it. Lazcano is a hefty quesadilla – but like the chimichanga and the fajita, it’s not truly Mexican.

Or is it?

Most stories narrow the creation of the chimichanga to a clumsy line cook in the Phoenix area, who accidentally fumbled a burrito. It fell into a vat of hot oil and the rest is culinary history.

While skillets of meat would have been familiar to cowboys working the border, it was a restaurant in Houston that added the attention-grabbing sizzle – and the name – back around 1972.

But perhaps the folks at Dos Arcos can claim their Quesadilla Lazcano is a Mexican original. It was, after all, created in Mexico … Missouri.