Meet The Florida Waffle House With Some Of The Most Brutal Online Reviews

Waffle House isn't bougie, but it generally excels at its raison d'etre: Slinging guilty-pleasure comfort food at all hours of the day and night. When you discover the number of eggs Waffle House serves per year or how many cups of coffee it has served since opening its first location in Avondale Estates, Georgia, you can't deny that folks love them some WaHo. Undoubtedly, you temper your expectations when you stumble through the doors of that yellow-roofed temple to fried food and bottomless coffee, but one expects certain standards from even the lowliest establishment. In Key Largo, Florida, there exists a Waffle House with absolutely terrible TripAdvisor reviews, leading us to wonder if its managers even give a flip at this point.

Under a rating pithily titled "Awful House," a disgruntled visitor wrote: "I didn't think you could find a bad Waffle House. This one is filthy. The servers drag the trash can up to the table to bus it. They don't carry the coffee pot to your table — they take your cup to the coffee pot. My BLT looked like a three-year-old made it. Really disappointed and will not go back." 

Another reviewer urged prospective customers "Don't go" and elaborated: "The waitress was acceptable, and the wait time was fine but the food was horrible. Their signature is waffles yet the waffles were overcooked, and they asked us if we wanted them. The toast was black. The egg was overcooked. The grits were cold." Others complained of scanty staff attention. What's going on, and are the bad reviews really warranted?

Celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain described the Waffle House chain as "better than fine dining" when he first visited a South Carolina outlet in 2015. Ostensibly, this location was run better than the dubious location in Key Largo. We figured that the lackluster guest experiences in Key Largo might have been due to a lousy franchise, but, come to find out, Waffle House doesn't really "do" franchises – the vast majority of its stores are corporate-owned, and the few franchises that exist were the result of special arrangements. 

All we can imagine is that Key Largo, being in the Florida Keys, is a very touristy area, and may not have as many regulars as a mainland location. Perhaps standards have become more lax since the customer base is largely itinerant? Of course, this is just a guess, and perhaps some level of bias could be involved — happy customers may be less likely to leave a good review, after all.

Again, nobody is expecting Waffle House to rate on a level with the French Laundry. It shouldn't be too much to ask for, however, for any place you purchase food to be clean and to have consistent quality control standards for the fare it serves. It's worth noting that this location has even worse reviews on Yelp, so the issues aren't confined to one particular platform (though it does have a better Google rating at 4.1 stars). We're big fans of our smothered and covered hash browns, but, if we find ourselves hungry in the middle of the night whilst in Key Largo, we might just give the local Waffle House a more careful look first.