ATLANTA — Waffle House is open again!

As rallying cries go, it’s not exactly “Give me liberty or give me death,” but in Georgia, where Waffle House is both a secular religion and a reliable barometer of catastrophe, unlocking its glass doors qualifies as front-page news.

As of Monday, Gov. Brian Kemp reopened Georgia’s restaurants, three days after opening other business establishments like bowling alleys and tattoo parlors. The move, coming even as the state continues to grapple with new cases of COVID-19, has drawn condemnation not just from Kemp’s political opponents, but public health officials as well. Even President Trump came down hard against Kemp last week, but Kemp’s drive to reopen the state has proceeded unabated.

But there’s more at work here than just a simple attempt to get the economy jump-started. Whether it was a savvy political calculation or just a sweeping catch-all decree, the thought of Waffle Houses, in particular, reopening carries a lot more weight in Georgia than your average fast-food burger chain.

If you mock the idea of a Waffle House being a communal rallying point, that’s only because you’ve never eaten at a Waffle House. The yellow-and-black logo, the red vinyl cushions, the warm glow of omnipresent globe lights, the all-but-infinite combination of hash browns (“scattered, smothered, covered, chunked …”) — all this and more combines to make Waffle House an inextricable aspect of any community it’s in.

View photos Life at the Waffle House in 2020. (Michael Mathes / Getty) More

The late, great Anthony Bourdain described Waffle House as “an irony-free zone where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts; where everybody regardless of race, creed, color or degree of inebriation is welcomed.” Sure, that’s painting with a brush as wide as an area code, but still: you don’t need me to connect the dots any more than that, do you? Where else in America will you find that kind of unity in 2020?

A Monday visit to one of the roughly 330 Waffle Houses in the state — where I was the only diner in the store, along with four employees — offered up two equally powerful sensations: how nice it is to get back in touch with some aspects of pre-COVID life … and how far in the future a return to that life still lies.

For my first meal outside the house in six weeks (by the calendar) or 14 years (by what it feels like in my brain), I picked a Waffle House not far from my home, one whose TEMPORARILY CLOSED banner these last few weeks was a grim reminder that even the foundations of the community have cracked.

Waffle House officials say they’ve gone from employing 40,000 hourly workers pre-COVID to 12,000 today. That’s a crushing economic blow, and it’s one key reason the stores are reopening. Waffle House workers can’t do their jobs from home. If they don’t work, they don’t get paid, and if they don’t get paid, the rent doesn’t get paid. It’s a grim cycle that doesn’t improve with social media scolding from those lucky enough to be able to work from home.

At this particular Waffle House, I’ve scarfed down waffles and bacon at 2 a.m. after covering prime-time NFL games, and at 10 a.m. after finishing Saturday runs. On these seats, I’ve seen couples fight and unite, I’ve seen losing fans drown their sorrows in syrup and winning fans paint the ceiling with scrambled eggs. I’ve been coming to this Waffle House for 20 years, and I’ve never quite seen it like this.

View photos Life at the Waffle House in 2020. (Michael Mathes / Getty) More

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