Singing the praises of Waffle House

Oct. 10—TIFTON — Plates rattling, bacon sizzling, a song pounding on the juke box, multiple conversations in more than one language. This is what the Waffle House sounds like on a Sunday morning in Tifton.

Waffle House is the Harrisons' favorite restaurant. Ever since our twin daughters were small, we've found Waffle House to be a refuge, always the same, not fussy, and serving good, plain food. Plus, if the girls got a little loud, they blended in with all the other sounds of a busy enterprise. And no one at Waffle House cares how you look. On Sunday morning in Tifton, people wearing church clothes might be seated in a booth next to people in bedroom shoes and pajama pants. We all come there for the food and the service, which are the same at Waffle Houses everywhere.

Waffle House has not always been my favorite place to eat. In college, our early morning restaurant of choice was the IHOP on Baxter Street in Athens. Around 2:30 — the bars closed at 2 — IHOP was filled with an assortment of mostly college students in various stages of sobriety. Even some well-known folks showed up there. My friends and I had breakfast one morning with Herschel Walker, who at the time was the favorite Bulldog of every UGA fan on the planet. Donna-from-Colquitt, as we called her, even reached over, stuck her fork in Herschel's eggs, popped a bite into her mouth, and pronounced, "That is a good-as-hell fried egg."

When I married, though, my allegiance switched to Waffle House. My husband had a travelling job, and he quickly grew to rely on Waffle House for budget-friendly, good, simple fare. As part of his job, Gerald had to endure many group dinners at fancy restaurants, whose attraction quickly wore off. Almost every town of any size in his territory had at least one Waffle House, which was often located next to the Holiday Inn where he was staying for the night. He soon grew to rely on the reassuring dependability and no-frills atmosphere of the Waffle House. As someone who loves breakfast any time of the day, I, too, fell in love with Waffle House, a passion we passed along to our daughters.

Waffle House as a corporation is unique. According to Chuck Reese of the Bitter Southerner podcast, the management structure at Waffle House is different from that of most large companies.

"Every executive in the management of those little diners, all the way up to the executive VP's, people you would expect to have grand offices at headquarters, none of those people even has an office," Reese said. "Every single meeting, all their business, it's done inside a Waffle House somewhere as the customers eat their meals around them, and the company just generally looks at the world differently."

According to Reese, "market segment" is not part of the lexicon at Waffle House.

"Because there are no segments," he said. "Everybody, anybody, is a customer, and treating everyone who walks into Waffle House as equals comes from the two men who started the thing back in 1955."

Tom Forkner and Joe Rogers Sr. opened the first Waffle House in Avondale Estates, designed to be, according to Reese, "a restaurant for the people." The new restaurant was open all day and night because, as Fortner noted, "Working people are out there 24 hours a day."

The Federal Emergency Management Agency even relies on Waffle House to gauge the severity of disasters. According to CNBC, former FEMA director Craig Fugate created the Waffle House Index after Hurricane Charley in 2004 when he and his colleagues realized that Waffle Houses were the last to stay open during the hurricane. There are three levels to the Waffle House Index, according to Accuweather.com. These are green: full menu, the restaurant sustained little or no damage and has full power; yellow: limited menu, the restaurant is running out of food or has limited power; and red: the Waffle House is closed due to severe flooding or damage.

Fugate wrote in a blog post, "If you get there and the Waffle House is closed? That's really bad. That's where you go to work."

During Hurricane Ian, at least 10 Waffle Houses in Florida were at red, including restaurants in Naples, Port Charlotte and Fort Myers.

When she was in college, my daughter had just begun to date a young man, whom I had never met. One Sunday when I was in town, Rachel asked Mark to meet us at Waffle House so he and I could meet. I should have known this romance was doomed when Mark joined as at Waffle House and ordered nothing, no coffee, no hashbrowns, no tea, nothing. Who can sit in a Waffle House and smell the eggs, bacon, sausage, potatoes, and raisin toast cooking and the coffee brewing in the same room and eat or drink nothing?

I should have known right then he wasn't the guy for Rachel. At the very least, social norms dictated that he order something, even if it was just a glass of tea. Mark said he did not order anything because he had already eaten breakfast. This was a harbinger of more weirdness to come. This guy turned out to be the walking definition of rigid. He told Rachel that he had already planned his funeral — I'm not sure how that came up in conversation because he was a healthy 24-year-old vet student. We might, however, have forgiven him the planned funeral, but failing to order something at Waffle House was too much for the Harrisons.

Gerald and I were invited to a wedding once in Albany, and, although we both lived there for a number of years, we could not find the wedding venue, which was located on the edge of town. After driving around looking for a road we had begun to doubt existed, we were, literally, all dressed up with nowhere to go. It was evening, though, and we had not had dinner. Where did we go? Not Gargano's, not The Catch or Henry Campbell's. We went to Waffle House.

We were the only people on a Saturday evening in fancy clothes at the Waffle House. Instead of a wedding banquet, I had my usual Waffle House meal: a fiesta omelet without the ham, grits, and raisin toast. I was happy as a clam.

Tifton is a town of 17,045, according to the 2020 census, and it has four Waffle Houses. This means that on a Sunday morning, as recently happened, if the first Waffle House Gerald and I stop at for breakfast after church is too crowded, we can just go to another one. Nothing in Tifton is very far from anything else, and another Waffle House is always within no more than 10 minutes, even if we catch a few red lights.

I love Waffle House for the comfort of good food, good service, and a fair price, but I especially enjoy Waffle House now, when we are bombarded with messages telling us as Americans how different we are, how one group is out to benefit at the expense or even from the harm of another. Spreading obvious and ridiculous lies, hurling insults and vulgarities and being applauded for doing so, trying to portray those who look, sound, think, and worship differently as evil, all these things drown out the acts of the kind, unselfish, and honorable among us.

When I slide into a booth or onto a stool at Waffle House, however, and look around at the different people who are there for the same reasons, I am reminded that good still lives in the humble environs of my favorite restaurant.

"Waffle House does not care how much you are worth, what you look like, where you are from, what your political beliefs are, or where you've been so long as you respect the unwritten rules of Waffle House: Be kind, be respectful, and don't overstay when others are waiting for a table." (Micah Cash in his book Waffle House Vistas)