Working At Waffle House T shirt

From the grill to the cash register to the dining room, Myrtle Whitman’s everywhere. For 30 years, she’s been as much a part of this diner’s character as a scattered, smothered and covered pile of hash browns.

At mid-morning on a weekday, she’s smearing generous pats of butter on toast then ringing up an order then checking on the steaming grill then chatting with a customer at the counter. She tells him she’ll retire from Waffle House in a couple weeks after three decades managing this very restaurant.

Soon, she’ll be sitting in one of those booths she’s tended for half her life, a retiree enjoying the fruits of decades of loving labor at Columbia’s Unit #309 on Garners Ferry Road.

 Working At Waffle House T shirt

Her biggest challenge starting out, she said, was overcoming her strong Dutch accent and picking up on Southern slang, like “y’all.” Connecting with people, though, was easy — “Wherever I go, I just make friends with everybody. That is how I was raised, so it was no problem.”

One of her first weekends working as a server at the restaurant, it was busy, of course, and Whitman was hungry. She asked her manager, who was cooking orders on the grill, to fix her some eggs. “He looked at me and said, ‘Oh no, I’m not going to fix you any food. You cook it yourself.’

“I said, ’Oh lord, you don’t want me on that grill. I don’t know how to cook Waffle House,’” she recalled. “That is how I started to eat grits.”

Her first impression of grits was, well —