I think it’s (yet another) cultural difference.
Growing up, baked/jacket potatoes here were available only with butter, sour cream, chives, maybe some crumbled bacon, maybe a little cheese, maybe a little onion. That was a “loaded” baked potato. The basic was just the butter, sour cream, and chives.
Sometime in the ‘80’s-‘90’s, somebody went crazy and put steamed broccoli and cheese sauce on one, and that popped up everywhere. Wendy’s still features that to this day, and somewhere along the line, someone tried one with chili, cheese, onion, jalapeño, and that was accepted.
That’s pretty much where it stopped. I don’t see much more beyond that these days here.
However (and I know I’ve mentioned this before), when we moved to Upper Heyford in the UK, there was a pub near the airbase that specialized in jacket potatoes. That’s all they served, and only at lunchtime, and they must have had 50 toppings available. We just called it “the potato pub,” and it was always our number one choice for lunch.
They had all kinds of “unusual” (to us Americans) toppings: corn, prawns, tuna, baked beans, etc. You could always tell the Americans from the locals, because we’d all stick with fairly straightforward things, like cheese, onion, bacon, and the Brits would be piling stuff we didn’t even know the names of.
It was a tradition that when a new person arrived, we took them to the pub and bought their first lunch, sort of a little welcome thing.
We got a new supervisor, and he had been sent to the UK thoroughly against his will, did not want to be there, so he arrived with a terrible attitude that just got worse day after day. He hated anything British, and my constant cheerfulness about anything British only made things worse.
We took him to the pub for his welcome lunch, and keep in mind, he’d been there less than a week, and had spent the entire grumbling about how this was what was wrong with the UK, and that was what was wrong with the UK, and oh yeah, this and that other thing as well. He was so negative, he couldn’t see anything positive about it.
We walked through the door, and I kept telling him, “Ken, you’ll like this. It’s just a baked potato bar. You’ll think you’re home, plus, here, we’re allowed to have a beer at lunch, unlike back home, so cheer up!”
As soon as we ordered and he turned the corner and saw all the “weird” things on the potato bar, he looked at me, and very calmly said, “Crayfish <meaning prawns> on a baked potato…I hate this f<bleep>ing place, I hate this whole f<bleep>ing country, and I f<bleep>ing hate you for bringing me here. Good job, azzhole.”
