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Last Tango in Tullahoma

I’m still not ready to write about my trip this past weekend to the Jack Daniels World Championship of BBQ.  Tempers ran high, and my entry in the Chef’s Choice category, which came in 40th out of 47 entries, will require a full feature post of its own.  What I do feel ready to write about, though, is the torrid three-day affair I had with Waffle House.


Waffle House, as you may or may not know, is a ubiquitous chain of 24-hour coffee shops which dot the Southland.  They’re more common on southern highways than roadkill.  Rare was the exit, as I travelled across Tennessee and northern Alabama, that didn’t have a massive yellow-and-black sign hovering high nearby, beckoning me to yet another plate of hash browns.


Because, the name notwithstanding, hash browns are what to get at Waffle House.  They bill themselves as the biggest seller of T-Bone steaks in America, and have named themselves after the blandest of all breakfast foods, but the star attraction here are shredded, preserved white potatoes sauteed in margarine on a griddle.  Other things are good here, too – I had a grilled bacon and cheesesteak sandwich on white bread that still puts a hop in my step. 

 
But in the end, it’s all about the hash browns.

 Hash browns are a special fetish of mine; from my earliest years they occupied a deep and burnished niche in my developing brain.  For one thing, they may well have been my first experience in food porn.  With my loud, bratty ways and narrow tastes, it was usually easiest to take me to franchise restaurants like Denny’s, Sambo’s, or the International House of Pancakes.  And what all these restaurants had in common were glossily illustrated menus, all featuring perfectly cooked shredded hash browns, evenly gold and brown, resting next to an equally idealized egg.  The egg I had no interest in, but those hash browns!  They were (and are) one of the few things that deliver on their promise, conveying the pure flavor of low-grade tropical oils so utterly that you could practically feel the palms swaying.  The textual contrast, too, between the crunchy bits on the top and the white underbelly underneath always made sense to me.

 

The problem was that the hash browns you actually got rarely looked like the picture.  Either a cook’s impatience left them pallid and pale, or their surface was broken in the course of the flipping, and the crisp shreds mixed irremovably into the white muddle within.  They were still good, of course, especially if you melted a little pat of butter over them, and liberally seasoned them with salt.  But then what isn’t?  My quest to get perfect hash browns was soon superceded by another, equally quixotic desire—to eat my fill of them.  Thirty years later, and I’m still waiting.  Beth’s Café, in Seattle, serves up buttery crisp shredded hash browns in kingly oval platters, one after another, as part of their marvelous all-you-can-eat offering.  But since I never go to Beth’s alone, my companions always end up hustling me out of there after just four or five refills.  And here I am with a mile of gastrointestinal tract!  I’ve still never had all the hash browns I can eat; but in central Tennessee, in the tiny township of greater Tullahoma, I came as close as I expect to for some time.

 
All the key factors were in place.  I was alone; my hotels were all located with a few feet of the restaurants, allowing me easy access at any time of the day or night; and the place’s architecture allowed me to sit at the counter just a few feet from the griddle, watching intently as they made the hash browns, and offering advice and encouragement.  

 
This last was a delicate business.  I’m aware of what a noxious spectacle I might make – a pushy Jew bossing around minimum wage help in order to satisfy my sick impulses.  It’s not quite Leo Frank, but close enough.  Happily,  the “hep” down south seem friendly and easygoing in direct proportion to how shitty their jobs are.  And in fact, I couched my requests to the Waffle House waitresses in the most abject, cowering terms. Oliver Twist asked for more gruel more assertively than I put in my request for my hash brown order.  And I took care to learn the special language of Waffle House in order to do so.


Because of its size and and age, and isolated as it is in the South, Waffle House has developed a whole culture of its own.  The juke box is stocked with records about the restaurant, and the menu encourages customers to learn Waffle House slang when giving their order.  Thus it was easy for me to ask for “triple scattered smothered, well-done”:  a threefold order of hash browns, spread out across the grill for maximal browning, with onions mixed in, and served extra crispy.  There was one more thing I needed, though, that the Waffle House staff wasn’t able to cope with.  I wanted those hash browns “extra greasy.” 


I don’t know if they thought I was kidding, or just didn’t take me seriously.  But I meant it.  The entire chain of communications was in front of me, as the maternal Tullahoma waitress turned and told the cook what to make.  She would repeat my instructions word for word, only replacing “extra crispy” for “well done” but omitting the “extra greasy” part entirely!  


On my second visit (lunch of the first day) I reiterated my desire for extra grease, but it was crowded and I could be sure that my order wouldn’t make it the the fifty feet from my bright orange booth to the unhappy-looking woman working the grill.  That’s OK, I thought; I’ll just come back late.  And so I did.  The Hampton Inn was clean and comfortable, and even provided a fitness center for me to exercise in, the better to work up an appetite for more hash browns.  On my third visit, 9:45 pm on the first day, the cook, a friendly black guy my age with a bad eye and a very hot grill, cooked up my hash browns just as I ordered them, and, for the first time, accomodated my desire for an extra ladle of the precious golden oil.  Sure enough, the potato shreds, which I believe are partially dehydrated, or freeze-dried, or something, absorbed the extra grease like the obolong little sponges they are, and after finishing the platter, I ordered another just like it for dessert.  That made six orders of hash browns, and it was getting late, but it was only after an intense internal debate that I decided to pay my check and shove off.

After all, I had two more days in Tullahoma, and a chef who understood me.  With a precedent in my pocket, and a protective layer of humor, I was all set to eat six more meals at Waffle House before I had to leave.  In fact, of course, the humor was just for show.  I said the “extra grease” part as if it were a joke, but I was as serious as a heart attack about my order.

Soon I was called back to New York, where breafast is served only with yesterday’s boiled potatoes, water-logged and no more crispy than a tub of pudding.  But my brief encounter in central Tennessee had changed my outlook.  “A fruit cup and coffee,” I told the counterman at the Moonbeam.  The memory of Waffle House was still fresh, and I didn’t want to dilute it yet.


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