Cooking up a Waffle House in LEGO for my modern city [Guest Feature]

Hi there, my name is Jan, username wooootles, and I am excited to contribute to The Brothers Brick for the first time! A short introduction: I am a huge fan of LEGO, and I tend to focus on MOCS- particularly LEGO City. I was fortunate to have LEGO as a kid, but my interest in the hobby really started to take off with the release of the first modulars: 10182 Café Corner and 10185 Green Grocer. My passion went into overdrive when I discovered Bricklink around the same time, just after getting my first paychecks as a working adult!

I’ve built car and house MOCs, but I’ve really focused on building and honing my MOC skills in big apartments and modular-sized skyscrapers. Wasabi District, my city layout, has been the result of nearly a decade of slowly building a super modern-style City layout, something that I think is uncommon in the Lego social media world.

While growing my layout with tall modern buildings has always been my core interest, that doesn’t mean that I can’t take a break from those once in a while, and my most recent example of this is my Waffle House build!

Hard to believe that my concept of this started almost 12 years ago! I had Digital Designer files for several American franchises, and in 2013 I ended up building a Barnes and Noble store. After that, many of my next builds were large skyscrapers, big apartments or houses.

This time, I revisited this little idea, starting from the floorplan. I wanted this to be small, like a real Waffle House restaurant, and so that if I wanted to sneak this in to my layout, I can be versatile. With that idea in mind I settled on two 16×16 plates as the base for the main building, to start.

I started the interior with the kitchen. I’ve always been fascinated with and enjoy building kitchens, and this one is no different. With this, I have really studied what a Waffle House kitchen would look like, so I ended up with this—big flat top grill with large exhaust, plateware and glassware hanging up top, and waffle makers.

Next up, I added the bar. Nothing too crazy here, I added condiments on the countertop, and then simple, brick-built stools. This is also a staple of real Waffle House restaurants.

I also added a juke box—now, this is not a completely original creation, as I have googled MOCs of other minifig-scale jukeboxes. Some of the newer Waffle Houses have updated to digital-style jukeboxes, but I decided to keep mine a little more traditional looking.

Of course, restaurants should have a toilet, so here it is. Sometimes it’s easy to forget a detail like this in a restaurant build, so I decided to dedicate a 6×6 stud space for a toilet and a sink.

The exterior does not have a whole lot of unique features, which is typical of a waffle house. In reality they’re just small, rectangular buildings with nothing much to them in terms of architecture. So I decided to follow suit with that and build the exterior like the real thing: angular and utilitarian. To make things interesting, I used masonry bricks all over the walls to give the building some texture.

The top does have some air conditioning units, the sort of urban detail I very much love building. In this creation I decided to put three HVAC units on the roof.

The sign is typical of a waffle house, yellow squares with huge black letters. I created custom waterslide decals for this (same type of decal you would see on airplane models) as well as the sign on the actual building itself. The main post in the sign is done using Technic friction pins and connectors as this would be way more rigid than a simple, brick-built one.

Lastly, to liven up the entrance I attached two 6x 16 frontage with some small sidewalk space and greenery.

And there we have it, a LEGO Waffle House Scattered, covered, smothered, and bricked! According to my digital file, this model is made from 1,394 pieces, which means it is in fact my smallest building MOC ever. And Wasabi District has never been classier.

If you’re interested in seeing more of my modern city builds, you can follow along on YouTube or Instagram. Like the Waffle House, we’re always open to guests!

The post Cooking up a Waffle House in LEGO for my modern city [Guest Feature] appeared first on The Brothers Brick.