U.S. Highway 78 between Snellville and Stone Mountain is a suburban mosh pit of what seems like every dining stop capitalism can toss at us. And then, between the McDonald’s and the Hardee’s, is the yellow-tiled sign that initially looks familiar.
“WAFFLE HOUSE.”
The words below it: “DRIVE-THRU.”
Drive-thru? At Waffle House? It’s the only one in the 1,800-store chain.
And it’s an eight-month-old experiment that begs the question: Why now?
“Once you think about it, it’s like, ‘Where have you been?’ It makes sense,” said Vickie Starkey, who lives in nearby Lilburn and is a regular at the restaurant at 5245 Stone Mountain Highway.
I promptly went inside and saw a Waffle House drive-thru attendant wearing a headset. A headset! Right there under the hanging 1950s-era bubble lights, by the plastic table booths and black-and-white photos of servers from 40 years ago.
I asked a manager at the McDonald’s next door whether he was worried about the new drive-thru rival. Dillon Stout, whose location like others in the chain recently launched all-day breakfast, told me “it’s nothing that will run us out of business.” In fact, he said, when he first saw the Waffle House drive-thru he was “more bewildered” than anything else.
That a drive-thru would be a surprise at a roadside diner should be weird. After all, fast-food giants have been doing drive-thrus for decades, perfecting the science of rush (except when they forget my fries). But Waffle House is a study in anachronistic ambience. It opened its first restaurant in Avondale Estates in 1955 and doesn’t seem too interested in bending to the fickle winds of change.
Waffle House isn’t against evolution entirely. It tried jalapeno cheddar biscuits for a while there, didn’t it? And the corner jukebox is digital now, right?