About halfway through dinner at Mayuri, I had to step away. I had to get up from the table, wind my way across the tight, cramped floor—dodging servers and managers and bussers and tangled knots of partiers standing in the narrow channels between booths and tables—and make for the door.
Joshua Huston
Worth the hour-long wait? Just look at that face.
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Mayuri Indian Cuisine 15400 N.E. 20th St., Bellevue, 425-641-4442, mayuriseattle.com. Daily, lunch 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m.; dinner Mon.-Thurs. 5 p.m.-9:30 p.m., Fri.-Sat. 5 p.m.-10 p.m.
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I was overwhelmed, lost and swimming in a haze of tandoor smoke, sweet incense, a hundred flavors, a thousand colors and the heat of closely-packed bodies. I could feel sweat on my forehead and the sides of my neck, a buzzing in my head like a TV tuned to a dead channel—static running up into the high spectrum and fizzing like a skull full of club soda.
At the door, bodies were packed in like the front row at a rock show, tight and unmoving, locked in and looking out across the floor with the thousand-yard stares of acid casualties or the fanatically obsessed. They watched the trays and the servers moving around the floor, focused like pachinko players and tracking the impossible-to-predict jinks and bounces; waiting for food to be delivered, for tables to be cleared, for the next few seats to open up.
I saw the Butthole Surfers play an outdoor show at a small amphitheatre once that evolved into a small riot when the mosh pit spilled into a poorly-placed seating area separated only by a low post fence. I was in the pit, lost my watch, had a nose ring torn out, and clobbered someone with a clod of dirt when the crowd surged and the kicking started. I also once attended a Ministry show where the cheap seats and the good ones were kept apart only by a four-foot drop over a retaining wall.
In both cases, there was a moment—never considered, never conscious—where the entire crowd went over the edge from relative restraint into complete anarchy. It was an all-or-nothing thing. One second, a small fence, a short wall, was enough to contain them. Next, there was nothing short of barbed wire, riot cops and moats full of flaming badgers that could've stopped them. The moment comes and goes in an instant, like a switch flipping. All sense of politeness and decorum goes right out the window.
At Mayuri, all that stood between the fully-committed floor and the crowd jamming the tiny waiting area was one small woman working two registers and a telephone at the same time. When she looked over the room, she did it with a field commander's eyes: merciless and calculating. And while no one (yet) looked willing to charge the floor, start grabbing idli rice cakes, utappam and rava dosa out of people's hands, and shoving them into their own starving mouths, the looks on some of the faces were not dissimilar from the ones I saw right before the fence came down, right before the mob of destitute punks poured over the wall like a wave.
I pushed my way back through the knots of people, turning my shoulders into narrow gaps, and twisted out the door into the cold and dark of the night. The sudden quiet and the chill in the air was sudden, like a slap. I walked into the parking lot, lit a cigarette, and leaned against my car—marveling at the distance a few steps can take you, the difference between there and here.
In New York, there are pocket neighborhoods you can slip into and be 5,000 miles away in a matter of a few paces. You can live there for years and never know about them, never stumble into them. Albuquerque has strip malls where no English is ever spoken. In Denver, there are corners you can turn where, in the space of a single step, even the air is different—where it can go from winter to summer, from Colorado to Saigon or Addis Ababa or Moscow, and the smells of foreign spices can change the way you think about distance forever.
Mayuri is like that: a tesseract door, a swirl of color and spice, the smell of strange latitudes. And suddenly, you're gone.
In the parking lot, fathers in Sikh turbans and mothers in saris the color of Caribbean oceans stood patiently waiting, letting their kids run the crazy out of them before dinner. More men clustered in a corner, waiting with their hands in their pockets. Families walked up and down the cement course in front of the restaurant, glancing in through the windows to weigh the mass of customers waiting—the division between this world and that no thicker than a pane of glass or the width of a door.
Outside, it was Bellevue at night. Inside, it was Southern India, Northern India, or some kind of strange mash-up of the two, where the Southern idli and rice-flour crepes and tin cups of sambar collide with tandoori meats from Punjab and Bengali seafood, coconut milk from Kerala and imperial Mughal spices, kormas and biryanis. An impossible place, as invented as anything, but made real on Mayuri's menu and floor.
