FLASHBACK 2000: Cliff divers, talking toucans and electronic foliage—Larry Miller’s new Mayan restaurant lives large. 

click to enlarge

In commemoration of City Weekly's 40th anniversary, we are digging into our archives to celebrate. Each week, we FLASHBACK to a story or column from our past in honor of four decades of local alt-journalism. Whether the names and issues are familiar or new, we are grateful to have this unique newspaper to contain them all.

Title: Welcome to the Jungle
Author: Ted Scheffler
Date: Mar. 16, 2000

click to enlarge

In a Britney Spears-Backstreet Boys-Out of ‘N Sync world filled with KISS, Kid Rock and Rob Zombie action-figure dolls, I suppose that a $12 million restaurant aimed at 12-year-olds shouldn’t surprise me. Still, the new Mayan restaurant in Sandy is astonishing.

For anyone who’s been hiding under a rock, the Mayan is Larry Miller’s new Mexican restaurant at Jordan Commons. It seats 1,000 people, features a souvenir shop that is larger than many restaurants (2,000 square feet), and counts among its 500 or so employees dancers, cliff divers, an army of servers and cooks, and an assortment of electronic birds and iguanas.

In Larryland, everything is big. Historical accuracy is for pinheads at universities. His restaurant is nearly the size of a real Mayan temple. And if you don’t look too closely at the Craftsman-style light fixtures or the 2-by-2 ceiling panels or the computerized flora and fauna, you might actually begin to think you’ve entered the land of the ancient Mayan people. Of course, that would put you smack-dab in the middle of the Yucatan and Guatemala, and where are you going to find 1,000 hungry people in Sandy looking for Guatemalan food? So, in Larryland you serve Mexican food—or rather, an Americanized version of Mexican food: the famous taco/burrito/enchilada combo platter. I seriously doubt any of the original Mayans or their 2 million living descendants have ever tasted a smothered chicken burrito. But again, it’s pretty clear Larry wasn’t aiming for accuracy when he built his Mayan monstrosity.

The Mayan is so annoying and so vile in so many ways, it’s hard to know where to start. I’m not even sure it should be reviewed as a restaurant. It’s really a theme park. Still, I went there with an open mind and a positive attitude. That positive attitude diminished considerably during my one-hour-and-15-minute wait to get into the place. After slowly worming my way with my party through a maze of people corrals, we were eventually led to a series of faux stone passageways, which I took to be part of the restaurant. These hallways were decorated with faux decomposing corpses mired in the faux muck of what I think was supposed to be a steamy, faux tropical rainforest. Or maybe they were would-be customers who had expired waiting for a table.

Eventually I was led to a relatively barren, but crowded, room, equipped with a number of very non-Mayan-looking computer terminals. I figured that this was Traffic Control Central—the place where the 1,000 potential customers were identified, sorted, labeled and managed. But it’s so much more than that! It’s actually where you order your food. Now picture this, you haven’t even entered the restaurant proper yet. You’ve not even glimpsed the interior. You’re standing in a stark room slowly dying of hunger, and you give your food order to a receptionist. No perusing the menu with a glass of wine, because that would slow things down. Next you are given a ticket with a table number on it (I have to admit I’ve never been to a restaurant before that had triple-digit table numbers). Ours was No. 242.

Finally, we were granted visitation rights to Larryland. After being led through a gauntlet of about 30 servers, we were taken upstairs and seated at a very tiny table for four. We met our server, who asked us something that we couldn’t hear because we’d arrived just in time for a show featuring an electronic toucan with a faux Jamaican accent. It kept using the word “mon.” To me, that’s more Bob Marley than Mayan. Anyway, during these stage shows, the sound is so loud that one has to shout at the person across the tiny table to be heard. Ted Nugent would fit in nicely. One bewildered guy wandered by our table shouting, “Where’s my family?”

About two minutes after we sat down, our food arrived. Obviously the concept at Larryland is “move ‘em in, move ‘em out.” We lingered long enough to witness the soon-to-be-famous Mayan cliff divers, who were preceded by a sort of “Up With People”-style show where a lot of nice white kids waved colorful streamers in the air to the sounds of faux Caribbean music. I was looking forward to seeing the cliff divers, because I’d not really seen cliff divers in a restaurant since I last visited Denver’s Casa Bonita back in college. Oh, and then there was the time at La Perla in Acapulco, where I watched actual divers dive off of actual cliffs during supper. But generally, cliff divers in restaurants are hard to come by.

Here’s something you should know: If you’re seated at a table on one of the many levels of the restaurant that happens to have a good view of the cliff divers, you’ll soon have interested parties from other not-too-fortunate tables leaning over yours to get a better view. It’s as if courtesy and common sense get checked at the door in Larryland. And here’s what you’ll see: Teenage boys dressed in faux Tarzan outfits jumping 30 feet into a pool of water.

You know the way that dancers in strip clubs come around for table visits when they leave the stage? Well, the Mayan Tarzan guys do the same thing. One soggy 15-year-old Tarzan approached our table, but seemed not to have a lot to say. I tried to pick up the slack, but what do you say to a dripping teenager: “How’s the water?” Thinking that this looked like a pretty good gig, I wanted to know if they were still hiring cliff divers. Then my wife pointed out the lack of logic in my thinking: A. Clad in a Tarzan outfit I would frighten children, and B. I don’t really swim.

The food at Mayan is an afterthought. It is cheap: only one dish runs higher than 10 bucks. And it is plentiful. But is a mediocre $10 burrito/taco/enchilada combo plate worth the aggravation of hour-long lines and the overall horrific experience that is the Mayan? I don’t think so. I heard someone say as we were leaving Larryland, “Man, that sucked!” You know that tab of Windowpane you’ve been saving since 1970? This is the time to use it.

Mayan, 9400 S. State Street; 304-4576. Monday-Thursday 11 a.m.-10p.m.; Friday-Saturday until 11 p.m.; Sundays 11 a.m.-9p.m. Combo platters $6.99-$9.99; salads $3.29-$7.25; desserts $2.25-$5.95.