Mix 5

On Sundays, Erin and I frequently have lunch after church at one of two places -- Costco or Pancho's. Lunch at Costco is usually preceded by us doing our weekly shopping, then stopping for either a hot dog or slice of pizza, the sum total of the Costco dining menu (they also have 1/2 pound ice cream bars, which frequently follow my lunch.) Pancho's deserves its own blog entry at a later date, but it features, quite simply, the finest Mexican cuisine in the universe.

A while back I took a gander at www.indyethnicfood.org in search of recent restaurant reviews and new places to dine. One of the new restaurants, at that time, was a place called Mix 5. Mix 5 purports to be Indy's only Iraqi restaurant. The reviews were positive, and it just happens that Mix 5 is directly across the street from my beloved Pancho's, offering a potential fallback option in the event that the Iraqi menu listed organs rather than dishes. (To give a picture of this neighborhood, there are three Mexican restaurants, two African restaurants, an Iraqi restaurant, a boarded up White Castle, and a place featuring "ribs, chicken, and fishes" all within a block of each other.)

We entered Mix 5 and discovered that it was an Iraqi grocery store, with the restaurant in the back. One of our favorite restaurants in town, the Cairo Cafe, has a similar setup, so this was not an issue. Plus I'm well aware at this point that the visitors to www.indyethnicfood.org place virtually no stock in ambience or clean toilets, choosing instead to focus on the cuisine. We were ushered into the restaurant, a term used loosely in this case. It was four glass top tables on a patchwork carpet floor adjacent to the kitchen. It also featured an aging 25" TV and satellite box, which was turned off or had frozen, I'm not sure which. It was approximately 60 degrees in this portion of the store, and we were the only customers. Erin and I are pretty adventurous, so we decided to stick it out, despite chattering teeth.

The owner soon emerged, seeming friendly enough. He spoke rather broken English, and he wore a dirty white apron and his hands looked to have been washed sometime around the end of the Cold War. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, we quickly put in orders for hot tea and a somewhat rich quantity of Iraqi food, which is similar to Greek or Turkish food -- lots of kabobs and meat cooked on spits. The owner, sensing that we had little to look at with his limited decor, quickly turned the TV on to an Arabic news channel. He turned, smiled at us, and headed back to whatever was making his fingers dirty. A few seconds later, an American emerged from the kitchen in similar garb and declared, "This here channel is in Arabic, right?" This seemingly obvious point caused the owner to reemerge. He quickly turned the channel to another news network, and I heard "...this morning in Baghdad there were lots of Americans milling about..." and so forth, in a well mannered British accent. "Is this the station that does the news in English?" asked the coworker.

Now it seems to me that if you heard a language you didn't comprehend on one station, but a language you DID comprehend on the other, if you were an English speaking individual, you would be able to figure out that the second one was the English language channel. I'll give this gentleman the benefit of the doubt and assume that the British accent was a curve ball. At this point, the Iraqi restauranteer looked at me and said, "You know Al-Jazeera?" I had already discovered that this friendly gentleman had a mannerism carried by many non-native speakers -- he smiled with every word and continually nodded as if suggesting your agreement. But in this particular instance, with the state of American-Iraqi relations today, I found myself struggling for what the right answer to his question would be. I also gave pause because there was a significant amount of blood on his apron.

"Uh, yes, I've heard of it" I smiled and returned.

Smiling and nodding, "The liar channel? They're liars? Yeah? Lies... Many lies."

I nervously smiled and chuckled. I was dumbfounded. Speechless. I looked to Erin for support, but her face said, simply, get us our kabobs and get me the hell out of here. I imagined parts of me clinging to his apron. Finally our host headed back into the kitchen. Relief.

The rest of our freezing lunch was relatively uneventful. As we left, I could see Erin glancing over to the Pancho's parking lot, longing for the warm embrace of a Pancho's burrito and their friendly Mexican providers. I suspect we'll be returning there next Sunday. When we returned home, I checked more recent reviews of Mix 5 and discovered that many others had had similar experiences there. One individual commented that he watched the owner get beaten senseless in front of his customers by a woman in a birka, shouting at him for being open during Ramadan. Opening a restaurant is difficult enough, but it seems to me this poor guy is fighting an uphill battle with his fellow countrymen. The Middle East can be a tough place...