Since they don’t put beans in their chili, and serve it on top of spaghetti, I’m not sure why it isn’t just a spicy spaghetti sauce?
pretty sure Tejanos don’t put beans in their chili either, so the lack of beans isn’t dispositive and i don’t know of any spaghetti sauce that contains chili pepper. Hence, it’s chili and not spag sauce.
I don’t cook beans in my chili-I cook them seperately and let everyone add as much as they want. But that menu stuff sounds like spicy spaghetti sauce to me-in my youth, I had a boyfriend from Houston who was mostly coonass, and he used to put bell peppers and gumbo file in his “chili”, no beans anywhere-he called it “Creole chili”, but I called it Creole spaghetti sauce...