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
But in the end, it’s all about the hash browns.
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 But then what isn’t? My quest to get perfect hash browns was soon superceded by another, equally quixotic desire—to eat my fill of them.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
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
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
Soon I was called back to
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