What Waffle House Taught Me About America

Waffle House/Millersville, Tennessee

When I moved to the South more than a decade ago, I discovered Waffle House. At first, it was simply another restaurant that dotted the highways and back roads of the South. As I began traveling those roads more frequently, I found myself stopping at these somewhat iconic restaurants. Initially, I was unimpressed. But over time, I became hooked.

At first, I think it was the predictability that drew me in: the familiar menu, the familiar food, and the familiar atmosphere. Eventually, I realized there was another kind of consistency—the people who ate there and the people who worked there. Waffle House has a culture all its own, a distinctly American subculture, a kind of melting pot.

Every Waffle House has its regulars and its transients. No matter where you are, there are similarities that connect them both. But what has fascinated me most over the years is the culture of the people who work there.

On the surface, there is the language—one I eventually learned to speak myself when ordering: "Pull one sausage. Hash browns, scattered, well done."

Beneath that language, however, is something deeper: craftsmanship, pride, and an unmistakable sense of competition, especially among the cooks. From time to time, I have overheard them comparing how many orders they pushed through during a shift, or talking about the legendary cook at Store #537 who still holds the record. There are bragging rights. The veterans mentor the newcomers, teaching them how to keep pace with the relentless rhythm of the grill while maintaining Waffle House standards. There is pride in the work.

But sometime around midnight, usually between 12:00 and 1:00 a.m., the culture of Waffle House changes.

It is much like the ocean, where one world exists by day and another emerges after dark.

The late-night crowd is made up largely of people coming from clubs, concerts, and bars. Some are customers ending their evening; others are musicians and performers who have just finished a gig. Many are regulars, something made obvious by the easy familiarity between them and the servers who greet them.

The conversations change as well.

During the day, most conversations remain between customers seated at neighboring booths. At night, those invisible boundaries disappear. Patrons and employees become part of the same conversation, voices moving effortlessly back and forth across the counter. The counter still divides the dining room from the grill, but only physically. Socially, it might as well not exist.

I've photographed people in every corner of this country, searching for the places where America reveals itself without performance. Waffle House has become one of those places.

Around these counters, sometime after two in the morning, the labels people carry through the rest of their day seem to lose their importance. Construction workers, musicians, college students, truck drivers, nurses coming off shift, and people with nowhere else to be all find themselves sharing the same space, waiting for the same meal.

It's one of the few places I've encountered where conversation still moves easily across every line we imagine separates us. In a country that often feels divided, that simple fact has become something worth paying attention to.

The Names We Give Our Hopes

August 4, 2019

For decades I have been fascinated by the names of small towns scattered across America—places whose names seem less like locations and more like aspirations.

This morning, as I drove from Pittsburgh back to Grafton, West Virginia, I left the Interstate in search of one of them: Prosperity. Like so many towns across America, its name seemed less a description than a declaration of hope by those who first settled there.

While searching for Prosperity, I first came upon the town of Amity.

Amity—a word meaning friendship, harmony, and goodwill.

Only one road passes through Amity. Two churches face one another across Highway 19—a Methodist church built in 1867 and a Presbyterian church completed seven years later.

Continuing on, I finally arrived in Prosperity—named after “the optimism of its settlers.” The town was much like Amity, although it appeared to be in a somewhat better state of upkeep. Houses lined both sides of the road, some with small front yards. The town sits at the “Y” where Highways 18 and 221 meet.

Having left Prosperity behind, I made a few wrong turns and eventually found myself, as best I can determine, near the town of Good Intent. Seven houses, a Presbyterian church, and a weathered barn stood along West Union Trace. The barn appeared to have witnessed countless seasons come and go.

As though framed within the doorway like a photograph hanging on a wall, a reddish-brown horse stood facing left. It was the only sign of life within the town.

Each time I drove through—which was three times, nearly back to back—there was not a person, dog, or cat in sight. It was as if all life had vanished, or had become quietly sequestered within the walls of the houses scattered across the surrounding hills.

With each of these three towns, I wondered if their namesakes ever became reality.

Perhaps the people who founded these towns understood something we often forget—that communities begin not with certainty, but with hope. Their names were not simply descriptions of what existed; they were declarations of what they believed might one day become possible.

As I continue to reflect on this, I am overcome by a sense of the hope that must have filled these early settlers as they established these places. There was a time when these towns existed only as an idea—when the landscape before them was unsettled, and people were stepping into uncertainty in search of a new beginning.

They were not simply building homes and streets. They were creating a future they could not yet see.