Waffle House: Just Roll on Down the Highway, and You Will Find One
Written: Jun 27 '01 (Updated Oct 28 '06)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Convenient; Open 24 Hours; Friendly
Cons: Greasy Food; Doesn't Accept Credit Cards; Limited Menu
The Bottom Line: Waffle House is interesting, and the locations are very easy to find, but the menu is limited and much of the food is too greasy.
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| Bryan_Carey's Full Review: Waffle House |
Waffle House is a large diner- style restaurant chain that was founded in 1955 by Joe Rogers Sr. and Tom Forkner, in Avondale Estates, Georgia. This is one of the most successful private restaurant chains, with more than 1,200 locations in 25 states and more and more opening up every week.
Menu Selection:
Waffle House doesn’t have a very large menu selection. Breakfast food takes about half of the menu. Besides waffles, you can order omelets, eggs, hash browns, breakfast sandwiches, and combinations of various eggs and meats, like steak, pork chops, and ham. Breakfast food is available all day, so you don’t need to worry if you get a craving for eggs at 11pm. Waffle House will gladly serve you.
If breakfast food isn’t to your liking, you can choose lunch or a dinner platter. The lunch options include hamburgers, soups, ham and cheese sandwiches, B.L.T, grilled cheese, patty melts, pork chop sandwiches, and a few others. For dinner, Waffle House has a handful of dinner platters. They serve Porterhouse, Sirloin, and Chopped Steak dinners. Or, if you don’t like beef, you can choose a chicken dinner, pork chop dinner, or country ham. Each dinner is served with a salad, and sometimes toast and hash browns.
Beverages are limited to fruit juices, Coke products, tea, coffee, hot chocolate, and milk. Waffle House doesn’t serve desserts, at least not at the locations that I've visited. They also have a kid’s menu, with small portions for the youngsters.
Atmosphere:
Waffle House restaurants are small, with the typical location seating maybe 30 to 60 people. They all have a bar area to sit at, and most locations have a jukebox to play your favorite tunes. The music, the size, and the bar give the restaurant the cozy feel of a small tavern. And local customers who make frequent visits are often greeted by name and talked to like regular patrons in a bar. If you visit late at night, it's not uncommon to find customers half asleep, trying to hold their heads up as they sip a cup of coffee. Also, because of the hours of operation, the late night customers are sometimes a little intoxicated. With late hours like this, when the local tavern closes for the night, Waffle House is a popular post- drinking destination. It all adds up to a unique atmosphere, for a restaurant. Not necessarily something great, but unique nonetheless.
Locations:
Most all Waffle House locations are found next to the interstate highways, and most of them are in the eastern half of the United States, particularly in the South. One game that people sometimes play, when traveling on long trips in the eastern United States, is to keep a tally of all the Waffle House restaurants that they pass, as they roll down the highway. It’s surprising how many there are! There are some locations within cities, away from the interstate highways, but Waffle House has always been known as the “Interstate Restaurant” and it’s likely to stay that way. The restaurants are all open 24 hours a day, 365 days per year, so they are convenient, too. No matter what time of day it is, or what holiday it might be, you can count on finding a Waffle House to serve you.
Pricing:
Waffle House prices are cheap, for a sit- down restaurant. Two people can dine for about $8 to $14 total. That’s not much more than a fast- food restaurant. If you just want a quick, simple breakfast for two, you can expect to pay only about $4.00 each. Even the dinner platters are inexpensive, costing only $5 to $7 each. One bad thing to note here is that Waffle House only accepts cash for payment. You can’t pull out the plastic to pay for your meal. Maybe they have changed this, at some locations. But the times that I have visited Waffle House, I have never found one that accepts credit cards.
Final Thoughts:
The best thing about Waffle House is the convenience and the friendly people who work there. It’s a popular place for people who travel, since almost all of the locations are found near the interstate highway. For myself, Waffle House is so synonymous with travel that I don’t even think about going there, unless I’m on vacation. There are a couple of locations close to me, but going there doesn’t even cross my mind.
The food at Waffle House is decent enough, but you need to be careful with certain items, like the patty melts, because the greasiness can make you nauseated very quickly. If you can’t handle the grease, you have to be very selective about what you order, because many of the items are dripping with excess oil and are loaded with fat. Also, if you’re of the vegetarian persuasion, you will not be happy at Waffle House. All of the lunch and dinner items contain meat. You will have to settle for a waffle or eggs, and some hash browns or toast on the side, if you want to avoid meat.
I don’t think of Waffle House as a great restaurant, by any stretch of the imagination. But, at the same time, I recognize it’s uniqueness and it’s convenience as two qualities that many other diner- style restaurant chains are lacking. I recommend taking part in the Waffle House experience, if you haven’t already done so. Just get in your car, and start cruising down the highway. You will find more Waffle Houses than you can count!
Be Sure to Click the Links Below to Read Reviews of Other Full- Service Restaurants:
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Recommended:
Yes
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