Eater - Leave Waffle House alone

Your TikTok foolishness is not welcome at Waffle House. | Getty

Welcome to Eater’s Weekend Special, an inside look at what our staff was buzzing about this week

The Waffle House is magic: You can go to a Waffle House at 3 in the morning, drunker than a skunk, and feast on waffles and cheesy eggs while watching two people who are somehow more intoxicated than yourself duke it out over some imagined personal slight. It is a sacred place, one where your TikTok foolishness is absolutely not welcome.

On Monday, a photo of a sign that reads “order from the menu, we’re not making you nothing you’ve seen on TikTok” went viral on Twitter, posted to the door of a random Waffle House location. The handwritten sign obviously isn’t an official policy update from the chain’s corporate office, but is an indicator of a staff that’s completely fed up with customers ordering dishes that they saw some influencer smash together. The sign specifically says “no waffle sandwiches,” referring to a recently viral mashup that involves shoving the guts of a Texas cheesesteak sandwich in between two waffles.

While some chains, like the cowards at Chipotle, have given in to the TikTok hacks, fully accepting that this level of extreme customization is just the new normal, Waffle House is not the place for those shenanigans. It is already a tough place to work because of those aforementioned drunks, who have a propensity to break out in fights that sometimes involve chairs being thrown at servers. This is a place that is already chaotic — and we love Waffle House for it. This isn’t a place to make content or be aesthetic; it’s a place to soak up all that booze you just drank, put some Beyoncé on the TouchTunes jukebox, and have a drunken singalong with a whole bunch of strangers while slathering your internal organs with grease. And that’s a perfect formula, one that does not need to be improved upon.

— Amy McCarthy

Follow Amy on Twitter at @aemccarthy

More on this:

My brilliant colleague Jaya Saxena on the unique and terrible ways that hack culture is making the lives of workers at places like Starbucks and Chipotle more difficult. It’s already hard enough to work at Waffle House. Don’t make things worse.
Trevor Lawrence, quarterback for the Jacksonville Jaguars, went to Waffle House after a comeback win in the NFL playoffs last Saturday, introducing many of his teammates to the Southern institution for the first time. He also ordered the Texas cheesesteak as God intended it to be served, not some dumbass TikTok creation.
This 2017 GQ deep-dive into Waffle House as a cultural institution is a must-read for anyone who loves all things scattered, smothered, and covered.
An eBay seller is currently hawking 88 vintage Waffle House-branded platters, made from Pyrex, on eBay for $1,320, and someone should absolutely buy them (for me).