![]() I mean, they start out as pale as something that lives under a rock, and after a while, they just die, right there in front of you, and you wind up eating around them. And the waffles, the holy eponymous waffles? They're okay, wide and round without being too thick, with a malty taste that mitigates their heaviness, but they're also the first items on the table to lose heat, and with that, something like their molecular integrity. ![]() The maple syrup? As fake as the little plastic-packed side pots of butter, which, in turn, taste a lot better than the ghastly schmear of glistening fuel oil that comes on the prebuttered toast. As a matter of fact, the typical Waffle House - and if you're speaking of one, you're speaking of them all - begins with a few liabilities for a restaurant in the American South purporting to specialize in the American breakfast. Flanking the counter are a few scant booths outfitted with molded plastic benches that accommodate no more than four diners visit a Waffle House with a party of five and you're screwed. There's a counter that faces a flat grill attended by a short-order cook who keeps a dorky, paper Waffle House hat perched on his crown, takes his orders exclusively by ear, and keeps his back to his audience as resolutely as a priest pre-Vatican II. ![]() Each restaurant has the same shoe-box shape, the same jukebox selection interlarded with Waffle House tributes and novelties, the same plastic-coated place-mat menus, the same you-can-eat-there-drunk-four-o'clock-Christmas-morning hours, and, more or less, the same layout. And Waffle House is, on the surface, nothing if not homogeneous. My gripe with the American South is not with its alleged peculiarity, but rather its homogeneity - its smug boosterism, its passive-aggressive encoding of "good manners," its landscapes parched and blasted by Christian surrender to corporate interests.
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