“My favorite 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. 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 turn-off for the main floor and the covered outdoor seating area where the 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 marker 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 over 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 there is everything from sketches of trees and grinning skulls, dire warnings (HERPES, written in a bold hand, with an arrow pointing to a name left by some previous occupant) to simple tags (Carla, written 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…).”From this week’s review of Mama’s Mexican Kitchen.This week marks the 25th anniversary of our Best of Seattle issue. And 25 years ago, can you guess what Seattle institution won the Readers’ Poll for Best Mexican?That’s right. Mama’s did. According to the people of Seattle, Mama’s was the best there was. And now, 25 years later, it’s still there, still slinging the burritos and tacos and strong drinks, still offering a weirdly authentic version of the Southern California Mexican-American cuisine that owner Mike McAlpin has been serving since 1974.So in honor of 25 years of Best of Seattle, I went back to Mama’s to see how it was holding up and what, if anything, had changed. Along the way, I got some surprising history out of McAlpin–stories about bus station tortillas and Mexican food in Hawaii–and found that “authenticity” is a tricky kind of word when it comes to the world of food.And come tomorrow, you can read all about it. The Best of Seattle issue will be chock full of all our picks for the greatest of everything that Seattle has to offer (including, of course, a large section dedicated to things we put in our mouths), but the story of Mama’s will be there, too–a quarter-century gone from the first award it ever took and still going strong.