The Ways of Waffle House
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The Bitter Southerner Podcast: The Ways of Waffle House Chuck Reece: 00:04 It's the Bitter Southerner podcast from Georgia Public Broadcasting, and the magazine I edit, the Bitter Southerner. Welcome to Episode Five of our second season. I'm Chuck Reece, and today we take you to a place that is familiar to every Southerner. The Waffle House. 00:21 (singing) Chuck Reece: 00:35 Yeah, we even sing about The Waffle House. (singing) And every Southerner has their Waffle House memories. Many are from late nights, and they might be blurry in the brain, because Waffle House is, after all, a place where the night owls go before they crawl in bed and hide from the sun. 01:14 (singing) Chuck Reece: 01:34 Many other of our Waffle House memories are from childhood, because every Southern kid will be taken to a Waffle House at some point. It took about five seconds for us to see this phenomenon one more time, on the day we walked into Waffle House store number 1000 in Avondale Estates, Georgia, with a bag full of microphones. Samantha Naik: 01:54 You want to answer some questions about The Waffle House? Chuck Reece: 01:56 This is Samantha Naik, and her daughter, Annika. Samantha Naik: 01:59 Well, she's only four, so she's been coming for four years, and I've been coming for as long as I have memories. Chuck Reece: 02:07 Sam lives around the corner from the very first Waffle House. It's now a museum and it's just down the block from the store that we're in today. She says coming here brings back memories from when she was a kid. Samantha Naik: 02:20 Our waitress was always Trina, and one time she let me go behind the counter, and work the griddle, and make my own egg and cheese sandwich, and one time a manager was there, and he was so entertained by us, he gave us like a full set of dishes to take home, and I still have them. (laughs) And I used to collect menus from Waffle Houses, around the country, on road trips. Like, or any time they came out with a new menu, I would ask if I could take it home. 1 Chuck Reece: 02:51 And she's now passing those special Waffle House moments on to her own children. Little Annika, she's kind of busy, right now. Samantha Naik: 03:00 What's your favorite thing to eat here? Annika Naik: 03:02 Waffles. I need napkins. Samantha Naik: 03:06 She and her brother both have that memorized. They've- Annika Naik: 03:09 Napkin. Samantha Naik: 03:09 ... always share the All-Star special, or I share it with them. Annika Naik: 03:12 Napkins. Samantha Naik: 03:13 (laughs) Napkins. Annika Naik: 03:14 (laughs) Chuck Reece: 03:15 Will somebody please get this girl some napkins, so she can finish her meal? Samantha Naik: 03:20 Do you want to say you can't live without hash browns? That's like- Annika Naik: 03:30 I can't live without hash browns. Samantha Naik: 03:31 Do it without your hand in front of your mouth. Annika Naik: 03:31 I can't live without hash browns. Chuck Reece: 03:36 It is indeed hard to live without hash browns. And you know, there's so many Waffle Houses spread across the South, that government officials use whether they're open or not as an indicator of how severe any natural disaster down here is. The federal emergency management agency actually has a thing called The Waffle House Index, it was created by former FEMA administrator Craig Fugate. Listen to him explain it from a 2016 episode of the NPR game show, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. Craig Fugate: 04:02 They are open most of the time, and that's- that was the index. If The Waffle House is closed because a disaster is bad, we call it red. If they're open but have a limited menu, (laughs) that's yellow, [crosstalk 00:04:14]. Chuck Reece: 04:14 Yeah, the index isn't just funny, it works. Because most Southerners will tell you that they depend on their 2 neighborhood Waffle House when mother nature throws life sideways. Which raises a bigger question, the kind of question The Bitter Southerner just loves to dig into. How is it possible for a 2000 store restaurant chain to become, in the eyes of almost all Southerners, something more than just another anonymous place to eat? Why do Southern families believe it actually matters that they take their kids to a Waffle House? I mean, nobody down here thinks that way about the neighborhood Applebee's. And a man you will meet in a moment put the question this way: how can a cookie cutter restaurant chain win over the hearts of millions of people? Well, like most things in our region, it's complicated. But we think we have some answers for you. So today on The Bitter Southerner podcast, the ways of The Waffle House. 05:16 (singing) Chuck Reece: 05:30 The man I just mentioned is named Micah Cash, and we would not be having this conversation at all, had he not called me with an idea, back in 2018. Micah is a photographer, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, and way back when, when the Bitter Southerner was just a baby, he was among the first shooters to contribute a big photo essay, visual journalism, as they say, to the Bitter Southerner. Micah's the kind of journalist that any magazine editor loves, because he picks a big topic and he gets fascinated. Maybe even obsessed with it, for a long time. Folks like that always tell great stories, and Micah began telling such stories with his photographs for the Bitter Southerner four years ago. Chuck Reece: 06:16 And in 2018, Micah Cash called me with a grand idea. He wanted to visit Waffle Houses all over the South with his camera, living by a strict set of rules. At every single Waffle House, he would sit down and order a meal, and then shoot photographs only from where he sat, and focused only on what he could see through the big plate glass windows. He said this exercise would teach us something important about the daily life of Southerners. 60 odd Waffle Houses and several months later, he came back with the goods, which we published under the headline, "Waffle House Vistas," on March 12, 2019. Micah Cash: 06:56 I went, uh, throughout the Deep South, so Loui- Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Florida. Chuck Reece: 07:10 And what did Micah find at Waffle Houses all over the South? 3 Micah Cash: 07:13 In many respects, Waffle House is not remarkable. Right? I don't think it's meant to be. It's ... I mean, eggs are eggs, bacon is bacon, it's meant to come out quick, it's meant to come out and taste good, it's meant to be consistent every time, it's meant to give you what you came there for. Chuck Reece: 07:29 Micah's own rules were equally consistent. Micah Cash: 07:32 I wanted the viewer to know, immediately, of what you see. The booths, the screens, the coffee mugs, that I was in a Waffle House. 07:54 (singing) Micah Cash: 07:55 It immediately re- leads toward the lived experience that all of us have with Waffle House, and then it forces the viewer, with all of that lived experience, to then look out the restaurant and witness um, the world that we actually live in. 08:18 (singing) Chuck Reece: 08:18 Photographing the world outside of a Waffle House was a conversation starter. Micah Cash: 08:23 You don't necessarily look at your server, or look at somebody in the booth next to you, and say, "Hey, where are you from?" Um, but when you are an artist, and you're sitting in a Waffle House, and you pull out a camera, and you start photographing the parking lot, (laughs) then people start treating you like, "What- what are you doing?" And so, you- you know, you tell them what you do, and then they think about it, and then it opens that door, to have those conversations about, "Well, let me tell you how long I've worked at a Waffle House." Or, "Let me tell you, I'm going to school and this is my lifelong dream, to do this." And- and they came up in- in a way that was safe, over food. Chuck Reece: 08:58 And that was the answer. 09:09 (singing) Chuck Reece: 09:09 It may be the one place that's common to the entire South, where you can happen into a conversation with just anybody, regardless of their race, place, or station, that's a Waffle House. And Micah's photos and words became the most widely read story of 2019 for us. So popular in fact, that in December, we wound up turning it into a book. Like, a real book, the kind you 4 can spread out on your lap. Now, you could stop right here and buy that book, and be done with it. But I think the job of this podcast is to dive into how and why Waffle House became such a place.