From take-out pizza to microwaveable burgers to Flunch, sometimes it seems like the French just don’t understand junk food.

There is, however, an exception: potato chips. My Lord, do the French have tasty potato chips. Now, it’s not their essential chippiness which is so superior to American brands — they aren’t particularly crunchier or lighter or less greasy. What they do have is flavors the likes of which I’ve never seen on the left side of the Atlantic.

Roast Chicken with Thyme flavor makes every chip taste like an entire perfectly roasted chicken -- but miraculously shrunk down to one crisp, delicious mouthful. My first thought upon trying these was, whoa, how did they make my chicken so crunchy? It’s as if someone took the skin of a broiled chicken, then deep-fried it.

The mustard flavored chips packed an intense, dijon-style wallop, while the olive chips were really… olive-y. More like “fresh” olives than like cured, oil soaked ones, which was unexpected, but good. We ate them with the leftovers of my lamb-bean stew, and it made me wish I’d put olives in the stew.

But the those smoked ham-flavored chips, with the old guy on the bag? Those really inspired us. We were snacking on them one day with a chunk of cheap, semi-hard supermarket cheese, when the idea struck: “You know, this cheese and ham and potato combination kinda makes me think of tartiflette. I keep wanting to stick them together.” To which my lunch partner replied, “French Nachos!” And the rest, as they say, is history.

Cultural fusion never tasted so good.