Well, I’ve peaked. I can say that my food career will pretty much be all downhill from here on out. Because the other weekend, I got to emcee the Waffle House Smackdown in Charleston, SC, at the Charleston Wine and Food Festival.
Waffle House isn’t just a 24/7 restaurant chain based in my hometown of Atlanta. Waffle House isn’t just a place where I order a patty melt and large hash browns scattered, smothered, covered, and peppered on every single visit. Waffle House is life. It’s beautiful, it’s messy, and it’s complicated, but it’s yours.
Up until about a year ago, when I took my mom, wife, and two daughters, I’d never been to Waffle House before midnight. The three hours between midnight and 3 a.m. are optimal for seeing and tasting its brilliance. You meet some of the best (and, yes, some of the worst) people at that time of night. Again, that’s life. So to be able to host a competition of this magnitude was a dream come true.
I’m only kind of exaggerating.
A huge crowd showed up to see four all-star Southern chefs (with their own restaurants) cook Waffle House food for a judging panel of professional Waffle House chefs. I told that crowd–and I’m still seriously considering this–that I might as well just quit my job now and ride off into the sunset. They made me a Waffle House name tag, for God’s sake. Where can I go from here?
The four chefs who faced off in Marion Square were
Ashley Christensen (repping Raleigh, NC),
Michelle Weaver (Charleston),
Ed Lee (from Louisville, KY) and
Mike Lata (Charleston again). They were competing for the title of “Master Blaster,” the honorary title of Waffle House’s short-order chefs. (Based on my WH experience, I’m guessing Master Blaster translates to “you can cook a crap-ton of orders in an hour while being yelled at by drunk patrons.”) The first round was split into men’s and women’s categories, and each contestant cooked a Fiesta omelet with hash browns. Weaver and Lata won their first rounds (hometown advantage never hurts), though it wasn’t really a fair fight in the men’s camp–Lee was the only chef who didn’t go through the official Waffle House training program before the event. He put grape jelly on the hash browns. Puh! Lee: You must respect the House. He’s a great guy otherwise, with a deserved reputation for taking his pants off at bars, but a Master Blaster, Lee is not.
Dining and Cooking