Valentine’s Day is a time for a heart shaped boxes of chocolates, flowers, Champagne, and of course, dinner reservations. Alabama is one of 22 states where romantic couples can get reservations at their local Waffle House.
The website for the restaurant chain lists two outlets in Huntsville, two in Guntersville, as well as Vestavia Hills, Daphne, and Millbrook among others where romantic couples can get white table cloth service along with the favorites that reportedly made Waffle House a billion dollar franchise that rarely advertises.
APR News spoke with author Ty Matejowsky, who teaches anthropology at the University of Central Florida, about it. He wrote the book “Smothered and Covered: Waffle House and the Southern Imaginary” for University of Alabama Press.
“Okay, so you're not the first person who's brought that up to me,” he said. “And I think my wife would appreciate the novelty of, like, the idea, but the execution of it, she might not appreciate as much. So I think I'm much better served if, if we go to, you know, a place that's a little higher in so let me just say Waffle House is good for Christmas in my household, maybe not so much for Valentine's Day.”
Matejowsky will discuss the success and mystique of Waffle House during season two of “APR Notebook” on Alabama Public Radio. And, he’s not kidding. A annual visit to his local Waffle House, known for its hashbrowns that the company says can be served in 1,500,000 combinations, as well as for its namesake waffles. Matejowsky says it's a Christmas tradition for his family.
“I can speak personally. Every Christmas morning, I go with my three kids and my wife, and we go visit, you know,” he said. “We open presents, and then we go to Waffle House and have Christmas breakfast. There. We've made it like a family tradition, you know. So this is been kind of like a nice aspect of our, you know, holiday, you know, traditions, and what, you know, what it's like at the Matejowsky household in Orlando. And so my kids come to expect it, you know, they're like, hurry up, let's open presents so we can go to Waffle House.”
The restaurant chain, known for its low cost menu with sixteen basic items, has become so much of a fixture, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) uses it as an informal metric of how seriously damaged a community is following a natural disaster. It’s known as the “Waffle House Index.” Disaster manager check local Waffle House outlets to make sure they haven’t closed. The chain remains open twenty four hours a day, fueling the myth that Waffle Houses don’t have locks their doors. The company says that’s not the case.
