![]() ![]() In a photo of Store #1655 in Monroe, North Carolina, a predominantly white county with a median per capita income of $23,732, signs for Good Steward Ministries Thrift Store and Knife Fork Family Restaurant tower over a half-filled parking lot. Then, on a belly full of Southern hospitality, he would pull out his camera. In the afternoon or evening, he would limit himself to coffee and a slice of toast. “If I’m feeling crazy, I’ll ask for cheese on them,” he adds. In the morning, he would order two eggs, crispy bacon, toast, and hash browns (scattered). From their bar stools and booths, he captured clear-eyed landscapes of houses, strip malls, highways, and scraggly fields. He traveled to Waffle Houses across the Southeast, eating at one to six Waffle Houses in a day and spending 10 to 25 minutes on each visit. Looking out the window, he noticed a Dollar General store and a payday loan lender, and wondered how often Waffle Houses are built around such businesses, and what that might say about the forces that put them there. Store #2181 in Birmingham, Alabama.Ĭash, a conceptual artist interested in geography and social history, came upon the idea for this project while eating at a Waffle House in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in 2018. They sling breakfast in communities of myriad backgrounds, from wealthy to poor, urban to rural, predominantly Black to predominantly white to predominantly Latinx.Īcross these differences, their food and service are so dependable that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) consults an informal “ Waffle House Index” to determine the severity of a storm’s impact on a community, where “Red” corresponds to a closed Waffle House, “Yellow” corresponds to a limited menu, and “Green” indicates an open Waffle House. Their hash browns are so storied that the menu comes with a dictionary of hash brown terms: “scattered” means spread across the grill, “covered” means topped with American cheese, and “country” hash browns come drenched in sausage gravy. ![]() No matter where they’re located, the franchises serve the same menu of Southern diner classics such as steak and eggs, Texas melts, and their namesake waffles. The chain, founded in 1955 in Avondale Estates, Georgia, consists of about 1,500 restaurants in 25 states stretching from Pennsylvania to Arizona. “Like it or not, the Waffle House is your neighborhood diner, replicated thousands of times over,” Cash writes. ![]() Store #1 in Avondale Estates, Georgia: the original Waffle House. ![]() And from the diner booths where he sat, surrounded by the smell of fried bacon and burnt coffee, he experienced what he believes the South, with some work, can become: a place where the food is good and everybody is welcome. For Cash, the ubiquitous Southern diner chain offered a perch from which to stare unflinchingly at his native South, from its old oak trees to its sprawling apartment complexes. He would know: Since 2018, Cash has sat in the booths of about 125 Waffle Houses and took photos of the world outside of their windows. “Waffle House does not care how much you are worth, what you look like, where you are from, what your political beliefs are, or where you’ve been,” photographer Micah Cash writes in the opening to his 2019 book Waffle House Vistas, “so long as you respect the unwritten rules of Waffle House: Be kind, be respectful, and don’t overstay when others are waiting for a table.” ![]()
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