The most memorable table at Mama's Mexican Kitchen is a big, high-backed booth tucked away in one corner of the warren of dining rooms that make up the entirety of the floor.
Peter Mumford
Foodies may turn up their noses at Tori Allessi’s decadent Elvis Presley burrito, but they’re missing the point.
Location Info
Details
Mama's Mexican Kitchen 2234 Second Ave., 728-6262, mamas.com. Lunch and dinner daily.
Related Content
More About
It's past the front room, choked with customers waiting on to-go orders and small parties just in from the heat, wilting into booths upholstered in red vinyl while they wait for their first rounds of giant margaritas in glasses like crystal buckets; past the little interstitial seating area in the bottleneck leading back into the depths of the place; past the turnoff for the main floor and the covered outdoor seating area where hordes of Belltown hipsterati sit with their trucker shades and long-pour cocktails. This table is all the way back by the wall in the corner, and to sit there is to see the whole history of Mama's bloom around you like an archaeologist exploring the tomb of some Mayan king obsessed with skulls and Elvis and neon beer signs.
The blue plaster walls are covered with scrawled Bic-pen graffiti; the high, curving wood of the booth's frame with names and dates written in Sharpie or literally gouged into the finish. And the seat backs on either side are gray with decades' worth of furtive scratching—more names and more dates, hasty pictures of eyeballs and skulls and declarations of love.
They are the cave paintings of Homo sapiens, hurried affirmations of existence, however brief, in this place at a certain time. The most recent is just two names, a man and a woman, who sat amid this swirl of history on July 22, 2010. The eldest are long gone—covered and smudged to gray illegibility, adding only a patina of age and forgotten good times to the cloth and wood and plaster. But in between is everything from sketches of trees, grinning skulls, and dire warnings (HERPES, written in a bold hand with an arrow pointing to a name left by some previous occupant) to simple tags (Carla, in a looping hand faded almost to invisibility and with no date appended) and the modern love poetry of the tequila-drunk and heartbroken (FOR A GOOD TIME, CALL...).
I was shown to this booth the first time I ever ate at Mama's. My second time through, I requested it. Third time, it was already occupied by a gaggle of long legs in short-shorts with girls attached—already well into the Mexican Bad Decision Juice by 6:30 on a Wednesday. So instead I hooked a left into the front room, where some local band was bemoaning the lack of available bass players on the scene and the stereo was playing a psychotic mashup of ABBA, Michael Jackson, and old-school NYC punk from the days when Mama's was still young and feisty and rare in offering tacos, burritos, and taquitos to Seattle's Belltown crowds.
Mama's has been at the corner of Second Avenue and Bell Street since 1974, and is beloved by many. But sometimes people turn up their noses at Mama's because of its staunch refusal to behave like a Mexican restaurant of the sort that lock-jawed foodies respect—to go all traditional and peasant-simple with the hog-face tacos and huitlacoche and strange moles with 10 generations' worth of backstory. What the snobs are incapable of realizing, though, is that the food that Mama's does is traditional and historic in its own right.
It's just a different kind of tradition, coming from a very different history.
Inside Mama's, the walls are covered with pictures: photographs, paintings, beer signs, flags, rising suns, twinkle lights, and sombreros all snag the eye. It's as if a gypsy cart full of arguable Gaudí masterpieces, American rock-and-roll kitsch, and the estate-sale hauls from a hundred Tijuana nightclubs pulled straight into the center of Mama's one day and just exploded.
Elvis, that great hero of Mexican-American relations, figures big in the design scheme here. Fever-bright neon burns everywhere you look. It's the ultimate weird-uncle-attic of a restaurant—a kind of museum of schlock. And the effect can be overwhelming, especially after a few cocktails.
But with all these visual fireworks suspended forever on the walls, it's easy to miss the less-flashy details—like the Best of Seattle readers'-poll award Mama's won as the best Mexican restaurant in town in 1986—the first year Seattle Weekly did a Best of Seattle issue. We're celebrating our 25th Best of Seattle issue this week, and that's what got me here in the first place—to relax into the clamor of one very odd restaurant with a historic pull when it came to introducing Seattle to this weird new stuff called "Mexican food."
In fact, when Mama's first opened, it stood as one of the city's very first Mexican restaurants—and about the only one of that bunch that's still in operation today.
"There was only a couple other places then," explains Mike McAlpin, who bought Mama's from his cousin, Ed Moya, in 1976 after just two years in business, and who stood as the place's cook for more than 10 years. "There was Casa Lupita," he recalls—referring to a tiny place where one woman (Lupita) did all the cooking. "And another place on Roosevelt—Campos, maybe? And I think there was Azteca in Burien."
