Meet the Short-Order Cooks So Good Waffle House Officially Calls Them ‘Rockstars’
By: Theodore Ross
Tags: Rockstart Grill Operator, Masculinity, Waffle House, Short Order Cook, Fast Food

Any readers still with me at this stage will have a right to know why I care so much about short-order cooking. Some may also be wondering, in exasperation, why it is I think you should care about it, but that is dangerous territory for a writer. Most stories of the sort I am writing take a different shape: The writer finds a cool thing, learns as much as possible about what makes the cool thing cool, and then writes something that sets out to inform the reader of its coolness. This is a valuable service — another term for cool is important — and is in fact referred to as service journalism. Investigative journalism and war reporting are as much a form of service journalism as travel and book reviews. Each one tries to establish authority with the reader by demonstrating knowledge. We are allowed to serve you because we know more than you do.

If it is not already apparent, I’ll just go ahead and say that this isn’t how I go about things. So what then am I doing messing around with short-order cooks? Let’s start with my griddle jock at home in Brooklyn. Why did I want to see him fail? I guess I’d have to say I’d take a perverse pleasure from it. Less enjoyment than making a lot of money, mind you, or camping with my children, or making love to my wife — these are not listed in order of importance — but his demise would provide a weird sort of comfort for me. Not a charitable way to be, of course, but I imagine some people will be able to relate to it, if not admit to it.

What I felt as I watched Charles was… something else. The obvious thing would be to call it jealousy. But that’s not exactly true, and for some very ugly reasons. Put simply, Charles and I don’t occupy close enough planes of social power for me to be jealous. Race, education, class, privilege, the whole fucked up intersectional soup that defines contemporary America, makes that impossible. To say that I am jealous of him is to engage in class fetishism. I spoke to several high-end chefs about Waffle House short-order cooks. They were all regular diners at the chain, and in fact had competed in Iron-Chef-like competitions based on Waffle House dishes. Each one professed respect for what people like Charles do, and admitted to their own struggles in trying to replicate it. But, and this was subtle, they also made it clear that it was a lower order of cooking, and that to be good at it suggested a lower kind of culinary ambition. No one said this outright, but it was there. One chef, whose name I won’t use, talked about the “big romance” surrounding the difficulty of short-order cooking. “I don’t want to dispel it. But there are harder things to do,” he said.

Short-order cooks in the United States earn about $24,000 per year. College boys like me don’t get to say they are jealous of people who do that. It’s condescending. The racial makeup of this particular Waffle House made things no easier. When a white American man expresses envy for the physical attributes of a black American man, however indirectly, it is by definition not a neutral act. Wesley Morris eloquently described this phenomenon in his 2016 essay, “Last Taboo: Why Pop Culture Just Can’t Deal With Black Male Sexuality.”

Short-order cooking is still governed, or at least can be perceived as governed, by long-standing assumptions about male behavior.

Besides, Charles was too good to think of in this way. He took pride in his abilities, but modestly, and was definitely pleased that I was interested enough in him to ask questions. His coworkers seemed genuinely to like him as well. Christie, who I imagine isn’t liberal with her praise, called Charles “the best.” The rest talked him up every chance they could. But I was still unsettled by how impressive Charles was on the griddle and here’s why: Watching him perform his duties, and yes, he was performing, at a mesmerizing and satisfying and enviable level, the closest I can come to describing it is with that most disreputable of contemporary words: emasculating. His competence seemed only to highlight my own deficits.

Bear with me here. I proceed from the premise that short-order cooking is a masculine profession in the conventional American sense. Yes, I know: Not only men can do it, not only men can do it well, not only men want to do it, women are probably better at it, women have historically been prevented from doing it — pick your disclaimer, write your hashtag. About a third of Waffle House’s Rockstars are women, which I consider a high number. But I do think that as a form of work in this country, short-order cooking is still governed, or at least can be perceived as governed, by long-standing assumptions about male behavior. A greasy spoon is a male environment, a place where the coffee should be black and bitter, where women carry plates and swab tables, and where men, the central figures, powerful and empowered, burn meat, flip pans, and wield tools. To assert this is not to defend it; it’s not even to say it actually exists. It simply means these notions influence, in ways I can’t entirely dismiss, what I think about short-order cooks.