If you love cooking or travel, you’ve probably heard of Anthony Bourdain. If you love cheap diner food, you’ve probably heard of Waffle House. Now, for the very first time, you get to experience both at the same time.
Anthony Bourdain–a world-famous chef, food critic, writer, and television personality–had never before been to a Waffle House until he went there last month to tape a segment for his CNN show Parts Unknown. Bourdain’s sherpa for his culinary excursion to one of the South’s most revered restaurants was fellow chef Sean Brock, who credits Waffle House for stirring his desire to one day become a chef.
“Now look, I’m looking at my hash brown, and I’m already confused,” Bourdain says as he looks through the Waffle House menu. “And enticed.”
“You can’t go all in,” Waffle House pro Brock tells him. “There’s a balance. And when you find your balance, you memorize it. I go scattered, covered, smothered, chunks.”
At Brock’s urging, Bourdain eventually orders the pecan waffle.
“You don’t come here expecting The French Laundry,” Brock tells Bourdain, referring to the famous restaurant by chef Thomas Keller. “You come here expecting something amazing.”
Bourdain’s verdict on the pecan waffle, and the whole Waffle House experience?
“This is better than The French Laundry.”
Of course it is. It’s Waffle House.
