L.A. Doesn't Need a Waffle House. It Needs Canter's Open All Night.

Waffle House isn't coming to Los Angeles, and I'm glad. The chain has never announced a plan to open here, as Eater LA pointed out in an Oct. 2 essay, and its own location finder lists 25 states. Arizona made the list. California, Nevada and Oregon didn't.

My argument is simple: L.A. already beats Waffle House on the plate and on the price. Where the city loses is the clock, and that's a problem a Southern chain was never going to solve. This is an argument from posted prices and posted hours, not from a booth.

Start with the money, since that's where Waffle House fans plant their flag. Jurni Rayne grew up in Dallas eating at Waffle Houses, opened her Southern brunch spot Gritz N' Wafflez in L.A. in 2022 and has had to find bigger space twice since. She told Eater LA that the chain's all-American breakfast, under $10 back home, would run about $27 here once insurance, taxes, overhead and labor took their share.

That's not a Waffle House. That's a brunch check. IHOP, which like Denny's and Norm's got its start in or near L.A., already sells a comparable combination plate for $18.99, Eater LA reported.

The cheap end of L.A. breakfast isn't hypothetical, either. George's Burger Stand, a fast-food diner in East L.A., sells a full pancake breakfast for $10. In Alhambra, Aloha Food Factory's short stack, enough for two people, goes for $8.99. Rayne's imaginary $27 Waffle House would lose to both before anybody poured the syrup.

The best case for the chain is the ritual: the scattered-smothered-covered order its regulars can recite in their sleep, the same plate in any of those 25 states. A ritual is worth something, but what people actually miss is how they were treated, and that already travels without a franchise. Sean Brock, the Virginia-born chef who owns Darling in West Hollywood, brought Daniel Humm and Will Guidara along to a Waffle House in Charleston early in the 2010s, and Guidara later wrote the chain's culture into his 2022 book on service, Unreasonable Hospitality.

Rayne put it plainer. "We don't want a Waffle House in Los Angeles," she told Eater LA. What she wants is the Southern hospitality, and she's running a dining room built on it.

Brock sees the big question differently. "Every city in the world needs a Waffle House," he told Eater LA. But his reason is the part that should sting L.A.: in the South, he said, "there's always one place that's there to feed you no matter what." Take away the waffle iron and that's the real product. A door that's open.

Here's where the city is softer than it thinks. Canter's, the deli at 419 N. Fairfax Ave. that's been feeding Los Angeles since 1931 and serves breakfast all day, lists store hours on its own site that run around the clock only from Saturday into Sunday. Monday through Friday, as posted on Oct. 4, it opens at 6 a.m. and shuts at 11:30 p.m. Its second location, on Santa Monica Boulevard, closes at 9:15.

So let Arizona keep the waffles. The thing worth fighting for is a Tuesday at 3 a.m. on Fairfax, and no chain from the South is going to win that one for us.

Source: la.eater.com, retrieved October 4, 2026. Other sources: locations.wafflehouse.com, cantersdeli.com.