Best Food Yet!

   

If you grew up in the South, you are probably familiar with Huddle House. For those unfortunate enough to have grown up where grits are exotic, Huddle House is like a lower rent Waffle House.  Truly.  It's a chain like Waffle House, but more resignedly self aware. Huddle House knows it only gets off the bench late in games, for junk minutes.  Management understands it can't compete, so it erects Huddle Houses in places like Millen, Georgia, where they only have to compete with a tire retreader and the 18-34 year old males openly selling crack in the parking lot, vying for your wages. Crack, not meth!  Quaint.

It's Waffle House minus the waffles, resigned to its fate as a vo-tech dropout.  In that regard, it's like Mr. Pibb, Dr. Pepper's underachieving half-brother who couldn't hack anatomy, but constantly reminds you of it by calling himself "Mr.," even  in casual settings.

For my money, Waffle House has more parking lot fights, but Huddle House has better ones.  And that is just fights between customers.  A friend of mine used to manage a Waffle House, and has managed other places.  Like so many of my friends, he is a skinny triathlete, often at a size disadvantage.  He avers that staff-on-staff violence is a store-to-store thing, irrespective of the company, but that controlling it is more about attitude and how a man carries himself than brute size. He adds that managing a diner chain requires a fellow to be part cook (cooks get arrested a lot, and otherwise no-show), part bouncer, part ref, and -- routinely -- father confessor.  If the priest-penitent privilege doesn't apply to conversations between shift manager and waitress, it should. 

When I was a kid, I associated Huddle House with football games, because we insisted that our dad take us to the one in Newnan, GA, late at night, on the drive home from Athens  We wanted to go because brand identification works: the logo for Huddle House was a cute cartoon kid in a helmet and pads, hugging a football.  At age 7 and 8, that was why we wanted to eat there. 

Also, even then, we knew what most fair minded, reasonable adults eventually learn for themselves:  waffles are ghastly.  Bland, window-pane batter, singed by a good ironing and rendered either brittle and vile, or gooey and tasteless.  You can only stomach the things with syrup.  Waffles are syrup vehicles and then ashtrays, but I'd never call them food.   So  as kids we went Huddle and left Waffle for others.

Years later I would realize that no one eats the waffles at Waffle House:  they go there for the omelets and coffee and -- if they are cops -- to pick up the younger waitresses.  As an adult, I've taken my business to Waffle House and freely admit it is now my favorite chain.  Breakfast is my favorite meal, and I have no compunction about making co-workers join me for lunch at an all day breakfast joint.   If I'm driving, tough darts, boys, expect to return to work smelling like hash browns and No Melt.  I have migrated to Waffle House partly because it's better, but also because Huddle House abandoned the football kid logo.

So I grew up, said so long to the Huddle House Football Kid, and eased into paying taxes, being a parent, and wearing clothes to work that had to be dry cleaned.  I began going to Waffle House once a week, when I wanted to feel like someone who lifted heavy things for a living and didn't wear a tie.  IE, myself until after college.  I didn't so much abandon Huddle House like an old teddy bear, as end up living somewhere civilized.  There aren't any Huddle Houses in my immediate area, because I live in civilization and all.

That's not to say there's nothing I miss.

I find I miss Huddle House's frank, sober self-appraisal as offered in its own slogan.

Best Food Yet.

That's genius.

They were banking on you to reward their honesty with your patronage.

Best food yet.  We mean, sure, there's better food coming, maybe a Waffle House, where the waitresses feign interest -- but we are the best food since exit 119, And it's pouring out there tonight.  We both know you're hungry, and it's late, and hey -- like you'd be ordering waffles anyway?

And so, after years away, I heard the sirens' song and  found myself in a Huddle House last Sunday evening.  It was pouring rain, I was hungry, and I was in fact in Millen, GA. 

Best Food Yet!  Please pay the ransom.
 
That's because I had raced the Augusta, Georgia Ironman 70.3 on Sunday, stuck around for the awards in the rain, and started my drive home wet and famished.  I inhaled  my 4 scrambled, double grits, wheat toast, coffee and tomato juice, stretched my 6-1 frame across the ketchup red and mustard yellow booth, and reflected on my race.  I'd done well and was pleased, and was now nursing my coffee to warm up in the over-air conditioned vault of a diner.  It occurred to me that I was probably the only triathlete in there this week, and certainly the only ovo-lacto vegetarian.  It further occurred to me sitting there pleasantly sore after a race I was happy with, full of greasy spoon breakfast, that Thomas Wolfe be damned, you really can go home again.

Just kidding.  What occurred to me, simultaneously wired and tired, was:

1.  Jesus Christ I am lucky not to live here;
2.  Should I sleep through masters swimming in the morning?;
3.  This coffee is marginally better than police station coffee;
4.  A bunch of abstruse stuff about bike fit, seat position, stem height, and aerodynamics vs. power;
5.  Look!  A shiny thing!  And of course,
6.  I need to get a blog entry done about this race while it is still fresh.

And so I sat down to blog about triathlon, and changed my mind, because I was spent and just wasn't up for it,  and decided to put it off  until midweek.  And Huddle House will let a man feel fatalistic about his underachieving.