My gripe with the American South is not with its alleged peculiarity, but rather its homogeneity — its smug boosterism, its passive-aggressive encoding of "good manners," its landscapes parched and blasted by Christian surrender to corporate interests. And Waffle House is, on the surface, nothing if not homogeneous. Each restaurant has the same shoe-box shape, the same jukebox selection interlarded with Waffle House tributes and novelties, the same plastic-coated place-mat menus, the same you-can-eat-there-drunk-four-o'clock-Christmas-morning hours, and, more or less, the same layout. There's a counter that faces a flat grill attended by a short-order cook who keeps a dorky, paper Waffle House hat perched on his crown, takes his orders exclusively by ear, and keeps his back to his audience as resolutely as a priest pre-Vatican II. Flanking the counter are a few scant booths outfitted with molded plastic benches that accommodate no more than four diners; visit a Waffle House with a party of five and you're screwed. As a matter of fact, the typical Waffle House — and if you're speaking of one, you're speaking of them all — begins with a few liabilities for a restaurant in the American South purporting to specialize in the American breakfast. The coffee? As bitter as regret. The maple syrup? As fake as the little plastic-packed side pots of butter, which, in turn, taste a lot better than the ghastly schmear of glistening fuel oil that comes on the prebuttered toast. And the waffles, the holy eponymous waffles? They're okay, wide and round without being too thick, with a malty taste that mitigates their heaviness, but they're also the first items on the table to lose heat, and with that, something like their molecular integrity. I mean, they start out as pale as something that lives under a rock, and after a while, they just die, right there in front of you, and you wind up eating around them. To be honest, I don't know anyone who goes to Waffle House for the waffles, and they don't serve pancakes any more than the Coca-Cola museum serves Pepsi.

So what makes Waffle Houses so great? Well, like many other Southern institutions, Waffle House overcompensates. Just as your big Southern university overcompensates for the SAT scores of its students by playing some kickass SEC football, Waffle House overcompensates for its bitter brew by serving truly delicious fountain products, including the best made-from-syrup Cherry Cokes extant in these United States, with free refills yet. It overcompensates for serving frozen, grated hash-brown potatoes by a) keeping them on the grill until they form a golden crust, thereby making them a perfect delivery system for the salt grains you can hear bouncing around on their surface when you shake the shaker, and b) serving them a dozen ways. The variations are as follows: You can get them "Scattered," which means plain; you can get them "Scattered and Smothered," which means with chopped onions; you can get them "Scattered, Smothered and Covered," which means with cheese; you can get them "Scattered, Smothered, Covered and Chunked," which means... well, I don't know what it means, exactly, because I've never gotten that far. All I know is that by the time Waffle House gets through with the variations on its frozen potatoes, it has made frozen potatoes into what Italians have made pasta, i.e., the bedrock of an entire culinary universe. And that's how Waffle House works, in general. Its menu is narrow the way the selection of notes in "The Goldberg Variations" is narrow. Let diners expand their menus by simple, relentless addition; Waffle House relies on a higher math, so its menu, which seems a forthright declaration of its limitations, is actually a celebration of possibility.

Which is why it's a lot like the American South: There is multiplicity within the homogeneity; there is eccentricity that keeps forcing its way past the willful blandness. The great gift of Waffle House is not that the food at every single one of its units tastes the same, though, in fact, it does; the great gift is that every single one of its units is different and owes something to the vagaries of its location. I have been to cracker Waffle Houses; I have been to African-American Waffle Houses; I have been to poseur Waffle Houses; I have been to North Carolina Waffle Houses seemingly consecrated to the burning of the tobacco leaf; I have been to Waffle Houses frequented exclusively by truckers; I have been to Waffle Houses that have offered succor when I've gotten lost; I have been to Waffle Houses that have made me feel like I was going to get killed in the parking lot. There are a lot of black people who won't go to a Denny's because of that chain's history of discrimination; there are a lot of gay people who won't go to a Cracker Barrel for the same reason. There isn't anybody who won't go to a Waffle House, though, because you can always find a Waffle House that suits you, and every Waffle House waitress greets you the same way, whether she's a big black woman with gold teeth named after Elvis or a scrawny white woman whose teeth function as a kind of redneck Rubik's Cube.

What I like: the cheese omelet, which unlike the inflated grotesqueries of other chains is, like Waffle House itself, made to a human scale, on the grill, so what it lacks in size, it gains in density and flavor, with cheese in every bite. And then, of course, the cheese eggs. To be specific: the cheese eggs, with a side of raisin toast, along with a bowl of grits and an order of hash browns "Scattered and Smothered," a few sausage patties, and a Cherry Coke. Indeed, all the foodies who insist that Jean-Georges Vongerichten has reinvented the scrambled egg by cooking it over low heat and beating it until the curds break up have never eaten at a Waffle House, which achieves the same effect just by adding some Kraft slices. The cheese eggs at Waffle House are like pudding, man, which is almost as high a compliment as saying their comically cheap cuts of meat — their saltine-thin T-bones and pork chops — are like bacon. But it's true: Waffle House steaks and pork chops are like bacon, which is to say, they're as nasty as bacon and as good as bacon at the same time. But that's not just Waffle House; that's the South, overall. Which is why I'm sort of stuck here, and why this godforsaken place still beckons. Welcome South, brother. It's as good as bacon. Just about.

ESQUIRE'S ALL-YOU-CAN-EAT BREAKFAST

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