Many restaurant customers these days are looking for food that’s out of the ordinary but not weird, affordable but fun, new but reminiscent of things past.
If it’s crispy and has little dents in it that will hold tasty sauce, all the better.
And that might be why lunchtime and dinnertime waffles are making a comeback.
“People seem to be talking about chicken and waffles again,” says Susan Goss, chef-owner of West Town Tavern in Chicago.
Popularized in pop culture by the Los Angeles restaurant Roscoe’s House of Chicken ’n Waffles, the dish is an African-American tradition whose origins are lost to history, although some people say it goes as far back as Thomas Jefferson, who reportedly brought a waffle iron back from France.
The dish, traditionally fried chicken with a side of waffles with butter and syrup, continues to evolve. So Amy Ruth’s, a soul food restaurant in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, has an entire waffle menu, offering waffles with fried or smothered chicken, fried wings, a boneless rib-eye steak, or choice of breakfast meats.
Goss was thinking of a side dish to serve at a barbecue charity event, to go with her smoked lamb shoulder, and thought of her mother-in-law’s potato pancakes.
It was a small leap from pancakes and waffles, but also a leap from the mundane to the slightly unusual.
“It came out of leftover mashed potatoes from the night before,” Goss says. “I just added some basil and orange zest and parsley and sautéed some yellow onions. They came out really well.
“Everyone thinks of waffles as great comfort food, more than pancakes, because waffles are special,” she adds. “When your parents made them, it was usually Sunday morning.”
Goss points out that waffles also have more structural integrity than pancakes. Rather than absorbing a sauce, they stand up to it and let the sauce collect in little pools in their indentations.
In the case of the dish that Goss ended up putting on the menu at West Town Tavern, those dents also collect cremini mushrooms, country ham shavings and lobster.
She makes a sauce of sautéed cremini mushrooms and scallions with thinly shaved country ham, some flour and lobster stock. She reduces that, adds heavy cream and finishes it with orange zest, basil, salt and pepper.
At service she reheats the sauce while making the waffles, adds precooked lobster meat and pours the sauce on top.
“If you made a pancake, it wouldn’t have the same plate presentation or leave the same impression on the guests that a waffle does,” she says. She charges $12 for an appetizer portion.
Although waffle ingredients are cheap, the food cost for that dish is high—around 34 percent—even with lobster as inexpensive as it is these days. But because it’s price is higher than her other appetizers, the net profit is still good.
Dominique Crenn, chef de cuisine of Luce at the Intercontinental hotel in San Francisco, uses 100 percent chickpea flour in waffle that she serves with fried chicken.
She marinates the chicken overnight in yogurt, Moroccan spices and chile sauce. Then she breads it in spiced semolina. She serves it with maple syrup and bacon ice cream—made by infusing bacon overnight in milk. It’s part of a $45 prix-fixe farm-to-table dinner.
Ryan Angulo has helped to popularize chicken and waffles in New York City, first at The Stanton Social, where he developed the signature chestnut waffles served with seasoned griddled chicken breast, and now at Buttermilk Channel, a Brooklyn restaurant that has fried chicken and waffles, $18, as a house specialty.
At The Stanton Social, where Angulo was chef de cuisine, the waffles were made with half chestnut flour and half all-purpose flour, with chestnut pieces mixed in before cooking. They were topped with cremini mushrooms and cipollini onions that had been sautéed in butter with parsley, chives and thyme.
The chicken went on top of that. Finally, the dish was topped with balsamic reduction mixed with maple syrup.
That syrup made the move to Buttermilk Channel, but now the waffle is made with cornmeal—something he also developed at The Stanton Social when trying to create a dish “that had some kind of polenta aspect without being polenta.”
It’s about three parts cornmeal to one part flour, with salt, a little sugar, buttermilk and “a good amount of Cheddar, so it gets that kind of frico quality,” he says, referring to griddled Parmesan crisps.
“People like the fact that it’s fun, and who doesn’t like a little breakfast at dinner?” he says. “It’s like how you see a lot of poached farm eggs on menus these days.”
Kent Rathbun is using waffles in a dish he developed to promote a local goat cheese at his new restaurant, Rathbun’s Blue Plate Kitchen, in Dallas. It’s a whole-wheat waffle, with added flax seed and wheat germ, not to make it better for you, Rathbun says, but “so it’s got some crunch to it.” He cuts it into three strips, puts quenelles of whipped local goat cheese between each layer and tops it with candied pecans. The pecan sugar syrup is further reduced, mixed with a local honey and served in a pitcher on the side of the dish, which is offered as an appetizer for $9. The price, he says, “reflects the cheese more than the waffle,” because waffle ingredients are inexpensive.
Rathbun says he thought the simplicity of the waffle went well with the artisanal nature of the goat cheese.
“The whole menu is a reflection of years gone by and food that I ate when I was a kid, and things you’d find in a country diner, [but] obviously done with the flair of chefs who have been cooking in high-end restaurants for awhile. But when you get down to it, it’s a waffle, man, with some cheese and syrup.”
And Rathbun says he’s been working with savory waffles for years—waffles and chicken, waffles and steak, even cornmeal waffles with crawfish étouffée.
He plans to make a sourdough starter so he can make sourdough waffles, too.