Dinner at the Mayan ( aka my attempt to be a critic)

These last couple of days I think I've been trying to make up for the fact I didn't post on my blog for about three months. I was having extreme writers block and now suddenly every time I turn around, I say " I should blog about this!!!"  Thus we come to my next entry.
I love food. I love eating food. I love looking at food. I love making food. My goal in life is to become an extremely fat, old lady with blue hair who just sits around on her leather recliner and eats all day. ( Okay, you caught me, that's not really my goal, but I really do love food!!!) Anyways, with that small fact established, you will understand why I love going out to eat. I have no money but somehow I end up going out to eat a ton. This week I've gone out thrice. Once to Olive Garden. Once to the food place at the Jazz Game ( the name escapes me) and once last night. To the Mayan. Before I go on to tell you how that dinner was, I should also explain that because I love food, when I go out to eat, I always come back happy with the service and food and any other thing that you could possibly judge a restaurant on. I have never felt like my dinner experience was unsatisfactory. Ever! Well that is until last night.
Here is some background on my relationship with the Mayan: me and the Mayan used to be great buds. Every year for my birthday I would be able to go with my family to the Mayan. The food seemed okay to me, and I got free deserts. I went every year. They changed their menu, their shows, their food, and I still kept going. That was until last year. I went to the Mayan for my birthday. They didn't sing to me because they had a strict policy of no singing to customers on their birthday. ( No I'm not kidding. They told me that.) Of course I could buy my birthday cake for 8.00, but they still wouldn't sing. I had extremely unappetizing food, and it was super expensive. Needless to say, I didn't go back for my birthday this year.
Then last night Wes came over to my house and said " Hey, do you want to go to the Mayan for dinner?"
I thought it would be a fun way to start the weekend so I agreed wholeheartedly. I told him as we were driving there that you go there for the atmosphere and to not expect the food to be amazing. This is how we start my food adventure.
We walked into the door of the Mayan and told them that we wanted a table for two, name Wes Hoover.  Literally one minute later, our name was called. We followed our hostess into the " South Passageway" down to the front of the restaurant. We passed about 50 empty tables with great views of the waterfall. She led us down the the very first row of tables next to the waterfall and I started to get pretty excited. There were some empty tables on the side where we would have a great view of the show. But we were lead right past these tables into a small passaway into the side of the restaurant. We were sat down and now, instead of seeing the "jungle atmosphere" or the waterfall, all I could see was a little hole into the actual restaurant, and an amazing view of the kitchen! There were about 7 tables all squeezed into this small cavern in the wall while there were 50 tables outside with nobody sitting at them. Needless to say, I was annoyed. Especially since I had a great view of an elevator, a bunch of highchairs and other unatmospheric items on the wall opposite of me. Our waitress came, introduced herself to us and asked us for drinks. We both ordered waters, and began looking at our menus.
If you're a poor high school student who doesn't have much money and wants a heart attack go look at the Mayan's menu prices. No really. Go do it. http://www.themayan.com/pdf/mayanMenu.pdf
There you go. Now lets look at this carefully. For dinner, we have 19 food items to choose from. The least expensive of these... wait for it... is $9.95.  Lets compare this with another great Mexican restaurant: Cafe Rio. It has 30 food items to choose from. The lowest price here, is $3.50 for one taco. Now lets talk about the kids menu. At Cafe Rio you can have a .95 kids quesadilla. You could even get your child a couple of sides like quacamole (.95 at Rio, 2.95 at the Mayan), sour cream ( .50 cents at Rio, $1.25 at the Mayan) and beans (.95 cents at Rio, and at the Mayan... $2.95) okay. So you've ordered that for your child at Rio. It would add up to $3.35. At the Mayan, for one tortilla filled with jack cheese... it's $7.95. Wait. WHAT? Some kid is going to eat on tortilla filled with jack cheese, that's it, for 7.95?! That's as much as an adult meal at Rio. Heavens that's as much as an adult meal at the OLIVE GARDEN for goodness sakes! If you add the same sides that you ordered at Cafe Rio, at the Mayan you would have to pay $15.10.  Now I could go on and on and on about the cost but I'm not going to. If you want to look up the Cafe Rio menu http://caferio.takeouttech.com/orders/menu.aspx and compare. I have to keep talking about my night.
So I decide to order the chicken enchilada. ($12.95 if you wanted to know. Oh wait I'm not supposed to talk about prices anymore. Sorry.) and Wes decided to get the Chile Lime Verde. ( Cough cough $12.95 as well. Sorry.)
Our waitress took our orders, gave us some salsa and chips and walked away. At this point I was frusturated but luckily Wes decided to make a joke of the night and I went along with him. He decided to come sit by me and as he got up to move to my side of the table I looked at the chair next to him. I got to see this. ( Picture Coming Soon) That's salsa my friends. Or some other food sauce. Smeared, yes SMEARED, all over the chair. Now this is something I would forgive normally but... really? With the place we were sitting I expected everything I was sitting on to be made of gold and silver to make up for the lack of atmosphere I was experiencing in the little cave our table was in. I shouldn't have assumed as much since it probably was a reject table where we just happened to have to sit because we... were teenagers? I don't know. Anyways. We were getting pretty tired of this so when Wes asked for some more water, he also asked if we could move tables. We were told politely that we would have to start all over again, go out in the lobby and wait for a table. Of course, we agreed that it would be silly to start over again so we just sat and waited. Our waitress didn't seem too happy we had asked that question, so we decided not to push it. She seemed like she wanted us out of there ( something that I've noticed many times before at the Mayan)
As we ate our chips and salsa ( and for being free they were really really tasty) we talked and waited for our food. Finally it was brought out to us in huge plates. Of course, my thought was " Oh no wonder it was so expensive, look how much food it is!" Then we started eating. After I put my fork in my food what ran through my mind was " Just kidding. Not as much food as I had first thought"  The huge plate was indented about .2 of an inch. The food was spread out to look like a lot, but was really not much. I only had two enchiladas a small bit of Mexican rice and some refried beans. The food was very unappetizing, and tasted bland. The chicken was dry, my beans were extremely salty ( poor waitress who kept bringing me water) but the mexican rice was great. Wes liked his but said it didn't have much flavor. Then he found a piece of fat. Then he found another piece of fat. And a couple more. YUM! Fat. Just what everybody wants to eat. As we finished eating I was relatively happy, but I think my food could have been a lot better. We were brought our boxes for our food and as Wes was putting his food in the box he found a hair. Yummy! Hair! My favorite!
Now this is the part I'm not proud of, but It was the ultimate test. I wanted to know if they still wouldn't sing to you on your birthday. So I pretended it was my birthday. Guess what? They sang. I guess they made up for last year when I didn't get sung to, but it was only my waitress and one other girl who sang to me, and I didn't get to do anything fun or exciting like the birthday's had been before. After they had sung I wished we hadn't had her do so, because she started pressuring us into eating dessert. After declining we paid our check,
we explored, watched one show and left.
So what do you think?
Should I go back?
Should I send this to them?
I think I will... but I'm not sure yet.
Oh and please don't think I'm one of those people who finds fault in everything, I'm really not. I don't complain when I'm at the restaurant, and never before complianed after. This just needed to be blogged about. :)