Waffle House is my childhood thing. We used to go there on Sundays or weekends every now and then with my family. It's just good, Southern, home-cooked food, and that's what I love.
Franchises and chains have come to dominate small communities, but those same chains have eliminated a lot of the greasy spoons, places you didn't want to eat in the first place.
I have an affinity for the old Seattle coffee shops, places like the Green Onion and the Copper Kettle, the classic kind of coffee bar - little places that served breakfast, lunch and dinner and have pretty much disappeared.
In terms of foods for me, I think I have more of the usual associations - foods from childhood that I associate with care and love, from relatives or special restaurants like the kind elderly man who dusted seasoning salt on French fries at the corner burger joint.
I love to visit the comic shops, and I don't want to call myself a 'foodie,' because that word is just stupid, but I love diner food, and I'm a hardcore fan of 'Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.'
I try to hit all the places Guy Fieri visits in every city I go to. It's, like, something a 60-year-old would do.
The Travel Channel had success with their 'Food Paradise' series, '10 Best Places to Pig Out' and those types of specials, so they knew there was a market for comfort food and wanted to develop a show around it.
I always like to find those little mom-and-pop sandwich places, or diners. Those are my favorite kind of places.
You know most of the food that Americans hold so dear - things like hamburgers and hot dogs - were road food, but even before they were road food, they were peasant food.
When you hang with a bunch of 300-pound linemen, you tend to find the places that are the greasiest and serve the most food.
