Review: Waffle House

The iconography of the real South is that of strip malls, pine trees, Duallys with filled gun racks, and skies pierced with the towering yellow and brown signs of Waffle House. If you have traveled the interstates of the South, you have seen Waffle House. If you have lived in the South, you have eaten at Waffle House.

The restaurant is such a fixture in the South that scenes in both Britney Spears' movie "Crossroads" and "The Blue Collar Comedy Tour" video are shot at a Waffle House. If "Pulp Fiction" had been filmed in the south, Ringo and Yolanda would have been robbing a Waffle House.

This Fall, the Georgia-based restaurant chain celebrated its 50th anniversary. Over those fifty years, Waffle House has crept into 25 states with 1,470 locations. The vast majority strategically placed along interstate highways, the current Main Street of the American South. Across Louisiana, on Interstate 10 alone, there are 17 Waffle Houses; that's one every 13 miles.

As the name implies, Waffle House is about breakfast. Cheap, filling, good American breakfast. Open 24 hours, "The House", or "The Awful House" as it is lovingly referred to everywhere outside of its own marketing literature, does serve lunch and dinner, but not eating breakfast at Waffle House is like ordering grilled chicken at KFC.

The laminated menu is simple: eggs, meat of every sort, toast, biscuits, hash browns, grits and waffles. There are no scones or croissants or coffee sold in sizes with made-up names. If you are on an "eating program" or have persnickety dining habits, this is not the restaurant for you. And if you want a pancake, you'll have to go elsewhere, because while you can get a waffle at IHOP, you cannot get a pancake at Waffle House. That attitude is indicative of one of the fundamentally great things about the place: it knows what it is and doesn't try to be anything else.

This is not to say that the food is not good, because it is. But the food is basic, it's breakfast; it's eggs and bacon and toast straight up. You've had it before and it is never bad. It's hot, fast, cheap and satisfying. You don't take your parents to the The House; you take your buddies who are helping you move on a Saturday morning.

Waffle House hasn't given in to the soft supple wood and deep, rich colors of every retail public space we enter these days. Virtually every Waffle House looks the same; brown rectangular boxes not much wider than a double-wide trailer. The completely open kitchen runs the length of the restaurant behind a dining counter, the grills along the wall, cooks with their backs to the patrons. This open-air kitchen is great entertainment; watching all the orders come together is like watching plate spinners in Cirque du Soliel.

The waitresses who stand no more than 4 feet away from the grills shout out every order to the line cooks. The cooks don't react to the order, they just continue flipping and grilling and pouring until every order materializes on a plate. The system was clearly designed by a mad genius; it's organized mayhem, but it is efficient and wonderful. It's like Mickey Mouse versus the mops, only at Waffle House, Mickey never loses control.

Universally, the waitresses all have names you expect in classic diners: Mildred, Betsy, Connie, and in Mansfield, Texas there is a Diana Ross who shares the same birthday as the singer, off by only a year. Whether they are friendly or surly, perky or worn out, they are always quick and endearing in their own way. They are people who daily deal with everyone, from the strung-out trucker to a booth full of drunken frat boys.

This brings up an important element of the Waffle House tradition: going at 2:00 a.m. When the bars close, and the only thing that makes sense is a big plate of carbs and butter, there is simply no better stop than Waffle House. In areas where bars and clubs proliferate, Waffle Houses become after-parties with fluorescent lighting. Every seat is taken, lines form, and the whole place becomes a slurring cacophony. It's fantastic.

Oddly, eclipsing the waffle as the signature menu item are hash browns. The basic Waffle House hash brown is a fritter-like mass of string potatoes grilled in butter until they are crispy on the outside. But what separates these hash browns from any other are the different ingredients you can include with the hash browns, and the accompanying name that goes with each ingredient. For example, hash browns can be ordered "scattered, smothered and covered," "scattered" meaning the hash brown patty is broken up, "smothered" meaning smothered with onions and "covered" meaning covered with cheese. There is also chunked (ham), topped (chili), diced (tomatoes) and peppered (peppers). Not only delicious, but fun to order!

Because the kitchen faces the dining room, and because waffle batter, eggshells and bacon grease are, by their nature, messy, there is a perception among some that Waffle Houses are not clean. This is not the case. It's messy to be sure, but it is never unclean. So maybe the towel used to wipe your table didn't get all the syrup up, and maybe the cooks do have batter on tops of their shoes, but there isn't any dirt, and there's no reason to fear any sickness. Does anyone think that kitchens behind closed doors are actually cleaner than those out in the open?

Waffle House is on a slow march along the interstate system of America. If there is not one in your town, there will be one day. And if you do any traveling at all, there is no reason to wait for Waffle House to come to you. Find one; you will not be disappointed.

— Patrick Quirk (pquirk@gmail.com)