Why yes, that is a construction hard hat I am wearing in a restaurant... why do you ask? ;)
Ah, the Waffle House. Thousands of locations across the country, and they all began with one in the Atlanta area, where I grew up. The Waffle House had a sort of cult following for teenagers in Atlanta. It was a place to go to hang out after school or at midnight on a weekend (before they had that curfew for teens thing in Atlanta - a good thing overall, I suppose... but I was a good kid and would have hated it then).
It wasn't about the food... it was the atmosphere. Even for non-smoking folks like my friends and me, the smoking section usually didn't ruin the atmosphere. We'd go to the WH for a place to talk, cheap coffee, vanilla cokes, and to people-watch. And I went to set a record.
See, I had a crazy goal to visit as many WH's as I could. At first, I thought I'd take a napkin from each one I went to, write the address on the back, and have the waitress sign it as proof. But that seemed too difficult, so I went to the idea of a logbook. I put an entry in a small notebook for every WH I visited - even if I just ordered water, even if I just went in to use the restroom. I also recorded interesting notes such as who was there with me, what we ordered, time and date, and any return visits. The logbook had entries from GA, FL, SC, AL, VA, and TN. As you can tell, this little obsession went right along with the love of random road trips.
A few brief stories about the goings-on at the WH...
- At the Sandy Springs location (behind the Target), my friend Karen and I decided to stop after school. We had my brother, Stephen, with us. He was not into the whole WH culture and went in reluctantly. He was lloking at the jukebox when a WH song started playing (Karen and I had queued it up to play). As you may know if you've frequented the WH, many of the waitresses HATE the WH songs. They are recorded by the wife of one of the Big Cheeses of WH and have titles such as "Waffle House Family II," "Waffle Do Wop," and "Waffle House Thank You." (I'm not making this stuff up. Honestly.) So the waitress thought Stephen had selected the annoying song and began yelling at him (we told her his name): "Steve! Did you play that WH song?!?!?" He was pretty surprised, needless to say...
- At the WH on Clairmont/PT Ind. Blvd., another girl from my high school and I would go occasionally after school. We'd have a dollar between the two of us, which we'd spend on an 80 cent cup of coffee that we would share (lots of refills), leaving 20 cents for a tip. The waitresses hated us.
- At the Rome WH across from the mall, my friend Randall stole a menu for me. I proudly hung it on display in my dorm room, and then when I was teaching, I used it as a tool for teaching money skills in math.
- At the location on Roswell Road about one mile inside the perimeter, at 11:30 pm, the day before my birthday, we got to experience a treat in the people-watching department. Randall and I saw a table full of drunk, gay, fat, white trash... and they were singing. It was funny, in a scary way.
