Waffle House: Where insane things happen over damn good food.
Waffle House has a frankly hilarious reputation for the chaos that happens there. However, some of that chaos has a purpose. All the yelling the servers do? Well, that information obviously goes to the cooks — and you will not believe how they translate orders.
From how our bags are loaded into airplanes to how restaurants really work, TikTok has a huge range of behind the scenes information on things none of us thought we'd ever see.
Take @hotsoupandcracker's account, for example. He's a cook at Waffle House, and he's gone viral for his videos on Waffle House's inner machinations.
"Jelly pack at the bottom is scrambled. If you get a mayonaise pack face down, it’s gonna be scrambled light. Face up is going to be scrambled well. Hash brown at the top means it's a plate. Without the hash brown, it would just get grits right on the plate, instead of hash browns."
"An apple butter means raisin toast. [...] And then, if you were to put a napkin up top, then that means the grits go in a bowl, not on the plate. All the way to the left is over light, in the middle is over medium, to the right is over well."
"Two pieces of cheese next to your scramble mark means it gets cheese, and you can combine the marks together. So this would be […] scrambled light with cheese[…] and then onions means gets smothered, onions in the hash browns."
I understand none of this.
"For the omelettes, you turn the packs sideways. All the way to the left there is a plain omelette. At the bottom is a bacon omelette. To the right is a sausage omelette, and up top is a ham omelette."
People claimed that @hotsoupandcracker was lying about the system, so he posted the official Waffle House guide. It's all real, and it's all confusing as hell. I could not do this for the life of me.
The servers take the orders and yell them back. The cooks grab the marks and lays them out on the plate, then gets to cooking. Nikki is right — this is a whole other language.
Let me just sidebar here to say: restaurant work is not unskilled work. It's actually crazy stressful, requires real talent, and it's hard. I know I couldn't work at an organized place like McDonald's, let alone follow the system at Waffle House.
Take a look at the full TikTok and learn even more Waffle House shortcuts right here!
What do you think of this system? Does it make sense to you, or would you totally blow it on your first day? Let me know!
