Waffle House Museum

This guide to the Waffle House Museum in Atlanta starts with company archivist Julia Bushman pointing out the jukebox in the corner, stocked entirely with songs from Waffle Records, a label the chain invented in nineteen eighty-four just to sing its own praises. It follows Joe Rogers Senior and Tom Forkner, who opened the very first Waffle House in this building on Labor Day of nineteen fifty-five, and the fourteen stools Rogers sketched by hand so no cook would stand far from a customer. Stand at that same counter, and you can still drop a coin in the jukebox and hear it play.