Why Waffle House is the perfect place to teleport to

As a connoisseur of Southern culture — a man whose family has been marinating in the Georgia soil long enough to qualify as a regional condiment — there are times when a story reaches out of the news cycle, grabs me by the collar, and says “Boy, you were put on this earth for exactly this moment.”

And when a government official claimed he teleported to a Waffle House in Rome-by-God-Georgia, I knew that this was one of those moments.

Gregg Phillips, the head of FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery — the man whose literal job is to show up when things go catastrophically wrong — has announced, publicly and with apparent sincerity, that God teleported him to a Waffle House in Rome.

I’ll give you a moment with that sentence.

Now. I want to be very clear about something before we proceed. I am not here to mock a man’s faith. I am a Southerner. I believe in the Almighty, I believe in sweet tea, and I believe there is almost certainly a Waffle House at the Pearly Gates. What I am here to do is gently note that the New York Times interviewed approximately 24 Waffle House employees and regulars at Rome locations, and not one single soul recalled a senior federal official materializing out of thin air next to the jukebox.

Not one.

Now, I’ve been to a lot of Waffle Houses. And I will tell you this, to the man’s credit: if a man suddenly appeared from nowhere between the counter and the jukebox, it probably wouldn’t be the strangest thing that had happened at the Waffle House that day.

But here’s what the whole episode got me thinking about — and what I think deserves its own serious cultural examination, the kind that only a man who gone into the Waffle House and ordered hasbrowns, bacon, and a bowl of chili is truly qualified to provide — is that most of us have found ourselves inside a Waffle House without being entirely sure how we got there.

It’s practically a rite of passage. It is as much a part of the Waffle House experience as the gristle on the bacon, the cook who has clearly seen some things and made peace with all of them, and finding a pair of soiled underwear on the men’s room sink. You don’t question it. You just sit down, order the hashbrowns scattered and smothered, and accept that you are exactly where the universe intended you to be.

Waffle House does not have a vibe so much as it has a gravitational field. You don’t decide to go to Waffle House. You simply become aware, at some point, that you are already there. The parking lot finds you. The fluorescent lights have always been on. The menu hasn’t changed since 1972 and it will not change when the sun burns out, because Waffle House will still be open and the cook will still be making the same eggs and he will not have heard about the sun yet because nobody told him and he’s been on since Thursday.

There is a reason FEMA uses the Waffle House Index — an actual, real, official metric — to assess disaster severity. If the Waffle House is open, things are bad but manageable. If the Waffle House is closed, it’s time to panic and get ready to stick your head between your knees and kiss your butt goodbye. This is not a joke. The federal government has outsourced its disaster barometer to a chain that puts cheese on everything and calls it a topping upgrade.

And honestly? Correct. That is the right call. Waffle House is always available in a crisis. It’s the place you can hang out in when your power goes out, when your car is stranded in the snow, when you are in an unfamiliar place and need food, and — as my wife and I found out when our oldest child was an infant — a parking lot you can pull into for a few minutes when your child has had enough of the car.

The menu itself is a document of profound democratic philosophy. You can get a full meal at Waffle House for the price of a Starbucks modifier. You can sit at that counter for three hours and nobody will ask you to leave or suggest you purchase something else.

The staff at Waffle House are a category of human being unto themselves, and I mean that with complete reverence. They have seen everything. Everything. They have seen a man cry into his pecan waffle at midnight. They have seen a wedding party come in still wearing the tuxedos. And if a government official did appear from nowhere, they handed him a menu and asked if he wanted coffee, because that is what you do, and that is who they are.

They work hard. They work fast. They work in a kitchen that defines the phrase colse-quarters, producing food for a dining room that never closes, for a clientele that ranges from “just got off the night shift” to “haven’t slept since Saturday” to “I’m technically still at the wedding.” And they do it with a competence and a cheerfulness that I find genuinely moving.

They also aren’t killing it on tips. 15 ot 20% of a typical Waffle House meal isn’t much, and any true Waffle House patron has stood in line with their receipt wondering if it is acceptable to tip more than you paid for the actual meal.

Here is my theological position, and I am prepared to defend it: if God is in the business of teleporting people somewhere, Waffle House is not an unreasonable destination. It is warm. It is open. There is food. Nobody is going to ask you too many questions. The lighting is honest. The prices are fair and the people who work there have a heart of gold. Unless they feel threatened, and then they might unload a can of whoopass.

If I were designing a place for a weary traveler to suddenly find themselves — confused, disoriented, unsure of the hour or the day or the sequence of events that led them here — I would design something very much like a Waffle House. You walk in lost and you walk out fed, and that is more than most places can promise you.

So whether Mr. Phillips got there by divine intervention, by automobile, or by the same mysterious gravitational pull that has deposited the rest of us in a Waffle House booth at an hour we cannot fully account for, we know he was well-taken care of there and probably was no more crazy than the other six diners there at the time.