Atlanta – My morning already started out bad enough. It isn’t easy waking up and realizing you are punting your healthy diet into the deep fryer by researching a column on Waffle House. Then I landed in Atlanta and learned I couldn’t locate one because the car rental office didn’t have a phone book or a phone.
But before I made a smart-aleck remark about whether they had running water, it hit me. I didn’t need a phone book to find a Waffle House. I’m in Georgia. This is its birthplace. This Labor Day, Sept. 5, Waffle House turns 50 years old. I bet I could leave this airport and stumble onto one in 10 minutes.
I was wrong. I wasn’t even close. I found one in one minute. It was 58 seconds, to be exact, before that familiar drab yellow sign appeared over the interstate.
I pulled in while fending away grisly nightmares of my last experience at a Waffle House. It was many years ago after attending an awards banquet in Salisbury, N.C. It was a black-tie affair, and afterward my date and I were starving. The only place open after 10 p.m., let alone open 24 hours, was a Waffle House.
Now imagine the scene inside a Waffle House in Salisbury, N.C., at 1 o’clock on a Saturday morning. It made that bar scene in “Star Wars” look like “The Last Supper.”
We waltzed in and immediately felt like England’s royal family crashing a cockfight. Sitting at the counter, I inhaled a waffle next to a trucker who may have weighed more than his semi. Meanwhile, my date tried keeping the little half-empty tubs of butter, which waitresses were bouncing around the counter like shrapnel, from landing on her Dior dress.
So at 11 a.m. on a Sunday I walked into the Waffle House in Atlanta, and it was still packed. People were lined along the wall, and as I looked at the clientele I realized the two athletes I came to Georgia to interview had never set foot in a Waffle House:
Michelle Kwan and Lance Armstrong.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 65 percent of Americans are overweight and half of those are classified as obese. Southern states, where Waffle Houses have spread like spilled bacon grease, make up 10 of the 15 most overweight states, and in this Waffle House, the number topped 80 percent. This brings up the riddle.
What came first, the chicken or the fried egg?
I pondered that thought as I sat at the counter while waitresses scurried around me with the speed and tenacity of Southeastern Conference linebackers. They shouted orders to cooks in a Southern-lilted roadhouse code that will baffle linguists for years.
I ordered a pecan waffle and something called “covered hash browns.” The word “covered” in any 24-hour diner makes me nervous. In this case, “covered” meant cheese, which, for only 30 cents, is one of seven hash-brown combos along with smothered (onions), chunked (ham), diced (tomatoes), capped (mushrooms), topped (chili) and peppered (duh!).
Waffle House’s drawing card, however, is waffles. They are the Krispy Kreme of the waffle family: thin, light and packed with sweet ingredients so addicting they make Ecstasy seem like Junior Mints.
Frankly, it’s the best waffle in the world. They’re much better than those thick varieties in other American all-night chains in which you don’t know if you’re biting into a waffle or an old mattress caught in a basement flood.
This is why Waffle House, in its 50 years, has sold nearly 5 million waffles. That’s nothing. It has sold 1.5 billion eggs, 1.1 billion orders of hash browns and 780,000 bacon strips.
If you put all the bacon strips sold in a year end to end, they would stretch from Atlanta to Los Angeles.
Seven times.
That’s 21,000 miles.
The 3.2 million pounds of grits sold annually could fill 86 semis. Stacking all the sausage patties sold in one day would top the Empire State Building.
Started in 1955 by Joe Rogers and Tom Forkner to feed friends and neighbors in Avondale Estates, Ga., the chain has grown to 1,470 restaurants in 25 states, with 363 in Georgia, the most in the country. Colorado has 13, including two in Denver.
And in Georgia, they are everywhere. On a 2 1/2-hour drive to Augusta, I had an unofficial count of 21 “Food Next Exit” signs. “Waffle House” was on 17 of them. I stopped at one in some offramp burg called Greensboro, and all five adults inside were the size of davenports.
As I waddled out after a waffle and hash browns, covered and chunked, I suddenly longed for another place I recently visited, a wonderful little stop where the people are healthier and so is the food.
Russia.
Staff writer John Henderson can be reached at jhenderson@denverpost.com or 303-820-1299.
