CINCINNATI — At some point during Tuesday night’s broadcast of the 2015 MLB All-Star Game, you will almost certainly see footage of stadium concessionaires spooning Cincinnati-style chili onto plates of spaghetti. And, depending on how you choose to enjoy live broadcasts of sporting events, you may then see a flurry of tweets or Facebook posts decrying the city’s much-maligned delicacy.

For much of my adult life, I should note, I participated in exactly that practice. I believed Cincinnati-style chili to be absolutely disgusting, a mockery of the form.

The city is sensitive about its chili, unsurprisingly. An article in the current issue of Cincinnati’s City Beat magazine even derisively cites a 2013 Deadspin post that called Cincinnati-style chili worse than getting hit by a car and described it as “abominable garbage-gravy,” and then turned it into some vague sociopolitical hot take.

But I am an intrepid and, at times, open-minded reporter. And I realized that the entirety of my experience with Cincinnati-style chili before this week came in a single sitting at Skyline Chili in 2003. Not only is that a woefully inadequate sample size upon which to judge a cuisine, but basing those judgments upon only the most prominent and most corporate purveyor of Cincinnati-style chili is something like calling hamburgers bad because you had one at McDonald’s. And hamburgers are not bad.

So I made use of Cincinnati’s bike-share program to trek over a bridge and into Newport, Ky. for a visit to Dixie Chili — a place recommended by Reds reporter and Cincinnati-chili defender C. Trent Rosecrans, who called the dish “the ultimate drunk food.” I was not drunk.

After a plate of “three-way” at Dixie Chili, For the Win is prepared to report that the much-reviled dish is not bad at all. Pretty darn good, to be honest.

The chili, served with a mound of cheddar cheese atop a pile of noodles, presents a strong mix of flavors including but not limited to the sweetness of tomatoes and the spice of pepper (and hot sauce, which was provided). There’s also a pleasant and warm hint of cinnamon and, I think, nutmeg — is that nutmeg? Allspice? Clove? — that makes the whole thing kind of taste like a strange but fortuitous drunken Christmas night culinary experiment. Plus there’s cheese, and cheese, notably, is excellent.

Because the cheese, noodles and chili are all soft, the dish lacks for diversity of textures. But they cover you there by including a bag of oyster crackers, which add crunch.

The primary criticisms of Cincinnati chili seem to be:

1) It looks kind of gross.

2) It is often served over pasta.

3) It is called “chili,” and other, different things are also called that.

The first is very much true. But plenty of delicious foods look something less than appetizing. When was the last time you’ve really stared down a sausage? How about pumpkin pie filling? Heck, two of our fanciest foods — lobster and caviar — both resemble nothing human beings were ever meant to consume. But we know they’re good, so we look beyond the looks.

To the second: Really? Someone decided to serve chili over pasta, and you’re acting like that’s a bad thing. Why is that a bad thing? Chili is almost always served with some sort of starch — I prefer cornbread — and using pasta allows for a far more effective and more efficient way of getting that starch to soak up the chili.

If you are broken up about Cincinnati-style chili being served over spaghetti, I implore you to serve your favorite style of chili the same exact way. You will find that it is delicious. Small-minded fools probably resisted the combination of peanut butter and jelly once, too. We’re here to combine existing foods to make better foods. This is America, you know.

The most frustrating critique to contend with is the third. It’s definitely important that words have precise meanings and we stick to them. But at the same time, precedent suggests that “pizza” in New York means something different entirely than “pizza” in Chicago, but both things called that are quite good. Cincinnati’s chili is a sauce, never to be confused with a big bowl of meaty Texas-style chili con carne.

That doesn’t mean it’s bad, only that it defied some people’s expectations. That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, like the guy said. Perhaps some can object to the use of the term “chili,” but those people would also become upset if they went to see Led Zeppelin and found a bunch of skinny dudes with long hair playing awesome music instead of a metal dirigible.

Both Led Zeppelin and actual zeppelins are good. So is a good plate of Cincinnati-style chili. That’s the whole point. Call it what you want, but do not call it bad, for it is not bad.