Time and Tide and Hashbrowns: A Waffle House Christmas
Some might scoff that anything magical can happen at a Waffle House, but like Christmas itself it is what you believe and put into it.
To fully appreciate Waffle House, one must come at it not as a restaurant, but as a sort of triage between work and home, the road and rest, hunger and fulfilment. Reviewing a restaurant brings standards and expectation, and a built-in judgement that however justified in the abstract is uncalled for in context. A triage station is just concerned with getting the job done and getting you on your way. We do not send critics to emergency rooms to rate how they run codes on patients in various suspended stages between life and death. A rating scale of one to five IV stands for trauma would seem ludicrous, whereas anything less than 3 out of 5 forks relegates a restaurant as only for the unwashed masses who wouldn’t appreciate haute cuisine even if those same critics deign to explain the wonder of it all in the low language of the common vernacular.
Critics are gatekeepers, you see, roving marshals who enforce cultural norms and patrol the unspoken lines of class, style, and taste so they themselves can speak about them. The triage, however, takes all the whosoever wills knowing full well that the need is…
