Waffle House, a not-comprehensive review

A few days ago, my dad and I drove through the American Southeast from Miami to New York. I thought about doing a think piece titled “I drove past a coal mine and now I understand the plight of the American working class,” but the truth is my dad and I stopped only to sleep at a rest stop and get gas, and I didn’t see one coal mine. We did see a lot of Waffle Houses, though, and decided to eat breakfast at one.

There really wasn’t much of a choice. At some point, you have to stop at a gas station, which will inevitably be across the street from a Waffle House. In fact, when we got off an exit in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, there were two Waffle Houses within approximately 300 yards.

Uncle Rico could easily throw a pigskin from this Roanoke Rapids Waffle House to the other Roanoke Rapids Waffle House.

I didn’t know much about Waffle House before I was in a Waffle House. I knew there’d been a shooting in one, and I knew that they close infrequently, even when there are large storms.

My dad didn’t know anything about Waffle House either. He also didn’t know what town we were in, and instead of checking Google Maps, he asked one of the employees where we were. Someone tried to explain what city we were in, but my dad didn’t understand and then some other waiter swooped in and pronounced the name of the city more slowly.

My dad pondering what other questions our waiter would be contractually obligated to answer.

In conclusion, the employees at Waffle House are nice. That’s a lot of the appeal. The Waffle House menu is pretty short and only includes foods that you could cook at home: eggs, toast, hash browns, grits, oatmeal, et cetera. They don’t cook anything any better than you reasonably could at home.

But that’s part of the charm, and that doesn’t mean the food is bad. There are no pretensions at Waffle House. It’s all an open kitchen, so when you order toast, you see them open up a supermarket bag of white bread and stick it in a toaster. They don’t act like what you are eating is special in any way, which is nice. There was a sign that said they had “America’s best coffee” but no one expects that, so it’s all good. It’s a nice place to eat and everyone seems happy to be there.

When the Waffle House woman puts the white bread in the toaster (heart-eye emoji, heart-eye emoji)

I got the All-Star Special. A poster outside the store said it was “The Greatest of All-Time,” so I had to consume it in its entirety. It included a waffle, three pieces of bacon, two slices of toast cut triangle-style, two eggs, and a little container of Welch’s Concord Grape Jelly.

As Dora’s backpack once said, “Yum yum yum yum yum delicioso!”

It was a pretty massive amount of food, and it took up our entire booth. It looked better than it did on the poster because the eggs were less scary and the hash browns weren’t shaped like a hamburger patty.

Doesn’t this look better in non-poster form? Or is this too blurry? I am sorry.

The food was pretty good. The bacon was not over or undercooked and the toast was not burned or untoasted. The eggs were over easy and the hash browns were warm. I was very hungry and it left me satisfied as we crossed several more states. It’s food you could make yourself, but then again you’d feel sort of bad cooking all that food for yourself, and you might burn something.

Waffle House is good. It has the efficiency of a chain and the friendliness of a non-chain. When I go to IHOP, I feel constantly aware of my own death. Maybe it’s the blueberry syrup. In Waffle House, the only time I thought about dying was when my breakfast came out on not one but three separate plates.

I know I’d give this place a higher review if I were from the South and had more aggressive nostalgia, but Waffle House is one of those places that makes you feel nostalgic even if you’ve never been there. It’s probably the jukebox.