Waffle House

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Waffle House Inc.
Type Restaurant
Founded Avondale Estates, Georgia (1955)
Headquarters Norcross, Georgia
Industry casual dining restaurant
Parent Waffle House, Inc.
Website www.wafflehouse.com

Waffle House is a restaurant chain with over 1700 stores found in 25 states in the United States.[1] The "low-rent roadside cafe featuring waffles"[2] (as characterized by screenwriter Ron Shelton) claims to be the world’s leading server of waffles, T-bone steaks, omelets, cheese 'n eggs, USDA Choice hamburgers, country ham, pork chops, grits, hashbrowns, patty melts, raisin toast, apple butter, and Heinz Traditional Steak Sauce. Most of the locations are in the Southern United States, where the chain remains a regional cultural icon.[3]


Contents

[edit] History

A Waffle House sign
A Waffle House sign

The first Waffle House[4] opened on Labor Day weekend, 1955 at 2719 East College Avenue[4] just outside Avondale Estates, Georgia.[1] That restaurant was owned by Joe Rogers, Sr. and Tom Forkner, who both continue to operate the chain today.[1] Rogers had started in the restaurant business as a short-order cook in 1947, at the Toddle House in New Haven, Connecticut.[5] By 1949, he had become a regional manager[3] with the now-defunct Memphis-based Toddle House chain, and was moving to Atlanta. He met Tom Forkner by buying a house from him in Avondale Estates.[1]

Fast food was a new concept in the early 1950s. The first store in the Kentucky Fried Chicken chain opened in 1952,[6] and by 1954, when Ray Kroc met Richard and Maurice McDonald, there were already eight McDonald's locations. Rogers' concept was to marry the speed of fast food with table service and around the clock availability. He told Forkner "...You build a restaurant and I’ll show you how to run it,”’ recalls Tom Forkner.[3]

A Waffle House, this one located in Hagerstown, Maryland.
A Waffle House, this one located in Hagerstown, Maryland.

They painted their new building yellow, to catch motorists' eye.[3] Forkner suggested naming it Waffle House, as waffles were the most profitable item on the 16-item menu.[3] The flimsy nature of waffles also made the point that it was a dine-in, not a carry-out, restaurant, but it confused patrons as to meal availability other than breakfast.[3]

Rogers continued to work with Toddle House, and to avoid conflict of interest sold his interest to Forkner in 1956.[5] In 1960, when Rogers asked to buy in to Toddle House, and they refused, he moved back to Atlanta and rejoined Waffle House, now a chain of three restaurants, to run restaurant operations.[5]

After opening a fourth restaurant in 1960, the company began franchising their restaurants[3] and slowly grew to 27 stores by the late 1960s, before growth accelerated.[3] The company is privately held and doesn’t disclose annual sales figures, but says they serve 2% of the eggs used in the nation's food service industry.[3] The founders limit their involvement in management, and currently Joe Rogers, Jr. is CEO, and Bert Thornton is President.[3]

In 2007, Waffle House re-purchased the original restaurant which was sold by the chain in the early 1970s and was most recently a Chinese restaurant. The company is restoring it using original blueprints for use as a private company museum. The museum will be used primarily for internal corporate events and tours but will occasionally be open to the public.[7]

[edit] Waffle & Steak

For years, Waffle House was known as "Waffle & Steak" in Indiana due to another chain of restaurants owning the rights to the Waffle House name in the state.[8] Reportedly, the original Indiana Waffle House chain has started using the name "Sunshine Cafe".[9] However, the d/b/a for "Sunshine Cafe" belongs to "Waffle House Greenwood Inc.", established in 1981.[10] The oldest "Waffle House" entity listed with the Corporations office of the Indiana Secretary of State is "Waffle House of Bloomington, Indiana Inc." established in 1967, and like Waffle House Greenwood, it's still an active corporation.[10] (Many of the Waffle House corporations in Indiana have been dissolved.) "Waffle House Inc." of Norcross, Georgia registered with Indiana in 1974.[10]

[edit] Controversies

[edit] Race relations

In January 2005, customers in four southern states filed suit against Waffle House for racial discrimination.[3] In their complaint, they asserted that servers announced they would not serve blacks, that the servers deliberately served unsanitary food to minority patrons, that servers directed racial epithets at blacks, and that servers became verbally abusive when asked to wait on blacks.[3] Juries exonerated Waffle House in the first two cases, and the plaintiffs were ordered to pay Waffle House's legal costs.[11] In August 2005, a Virginia Waffle House operator settled the lawsuits filed by 12 black, Asian-American and Hispanic patrons.

Waffle House has otherwise had a long history of positive race relations. In 1960, when civil rights demonstrators were picketing many Atlanta businesses, many other businesses closed, but when Rogers saw demonstrators gathering outside a Waffle House, he walked outside, and invited the demonstrators to come in and eat.[5]

[edit] Dateline NBC investigation

Apparently inspired by a serious salmonella problem in 2003 at a Chili's location in Vernon Hills, Illinois,[12] and the four 1993 deaths from E. Coli in undercooked hamburger at Jack in the Box,[13] the Dateline NBC television news magazine in 2004 investigated sanitation practices of popular American family restaurant chains, measuring the number of critical violations per inspection. The Waffle House averaged 1.6 critical violations per inspection.[14] Waffle House's response to the study pointed out that they prepare all meals in an open kitchen, and consumers can readily observe their sanitation practices themselves.[15]

[edit] Iconic status

Much as other open-all-night eateries have (including White Castle, Denny's and Krispy Kreme), Waffle House has developed into a cultural icon. Jim Ridley wrote in 1997:

The Waffle House is everywhere in the South. It has inspired country songs, comedy routines, loving editorials, a scene in the movie Tin Cup, even Web sites and Internet newsgroups that breathlessly post late-breaking developments. With more than 1,200 locations in 20 states, as far north as Eastlake, Ohio and as far west as Arizona, Waffle House is cherished by thousands of diners. Regular customers speak of its employees, its customs, and its food with near reverence. Touring musicians have been known to eat five meals a week there. And yet the Waffle House is so pervasive it's invisible. It doesn't advertise; it hides in plain sight.[16]

The chain's restaurants almost always have a jukebox which plays 45 rpm singles. Often the entire first column of selections and much of the second have songs about Waffle House and its food. Many of the songs are written and/or sung by people with connections to the chain, such as Mary Welch Rogers. The songs are on ordinary discs which are produced for Waffle House and are not commercially sold, but the chain has made a CD of some of the songs available for sale. References to Waffle House have cropped up in Southern hip hop music. Atlanta area rapper Gucci Mane mentions the Waffle House in several songs including his 2006 single entitled "pillz." It has now even reached into West Coast hip hop, with Compton's DJ Quik's 2007 Hit "Can You Werk Wit Dat", which features the lyrics "It's that southern hospitality, That's my reality, We hit the Waffle House and finish with some aleezay"

The waitresses use diner lingo to call in orders, and the menu suggests the use of the same lingo when placing orders for hashed brown potatoes: "scattered" (spread on the grill), "smothered" (with onions), "covered" (with cheese), "chunked" (with diced ham), "diced" (with diced tomatoes), "peppered" (with jalapeño peppers), "capped" (with mushrooms), "topped" (with chili) and "all the way" (with all available toppings).[17] This has also made its way into popular culture: The Bloodhound Gang mentions in "The Bad Touch", and Scattered, Smothered and Covered is the title of a compilation album by Hootie & the Blowfish. Julia Williams, a third season contestant on the U.S. edition of the television series Hell's Kitchen, noted her background as a short-order cook at a Waffle House location during competition. The October 12, 2007 episode of The Steve Wilkos Show, where Steve took over as a waiter, was taped at Waffle House.

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c d Waffle House history
  2. ^ Tin Cup script
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Waffle House still dishin’ diner food at 50
  4. ^ a b Then and now photos of Waffle House #1.
  5. ^ a b c d Atlanta Journal-Constitution, December 24, 2004
  6. ^ Fast Food Nation
  7. ^ Macdonald, Mary. "Waffle House whips up a sizzling museum", Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 2007-07-12. Retrieved on 2007-07-12. 
  8. ^ The NecroKonicon
  9. ^ Bomp
  10. ^ a b c Indiana Corporations search
  11. ^ Waffle House press release
  12. ^ Salmonella at Chili's
  13. ^ Jack in the Box deaths
  14. ^ Dateline NBC report
  15. ^ Waffle House responds to Dateline
  16. ^ Arts & Leisure: The Mysterious, Mundane Magic of Waffle House
  17. ^ Waffle House menu/placemat

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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