In Re: Hashbrowns

In regard to hashbrowns one MUST take a position. This is after all...The St. Louis Diner Review. Hashbrowns are one of the keys to any good diner. But what makes a hash brown? Wikipedia makes a nice stab which you can check out here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_brown

But it is not decisive enough. It does not really take a stand on so many important issues. A lot of diners "say" they have hash browns and then you get "breakfast potatoes." * Potato chunks fried up. Everyone KNOWS these are not hash browns. these are breakfast potatoes for God sakes. Their still honorable...unless tainted with green peppers and onions at which time they morph into the heinous potatoes O'Brien. the Irish can ruin anything if given a chance to cook it.

The real hash brown is the shredded hash brown. Waffle House (The Walmart of Breakfast) serves them excellently and in a number of different forms. Sometimes they cook them into a cake but otherwise they are "scattered" (spread out on the grill), "Smothered" (covered with cheese), "covered" (topped with onions), "peppered" (with jelapenoes on top). Waffle House according to their web site has served over one billion orders of hashbrowns. It makes me tear up. You can check out other fun Waffle House facts here:

http://www.wafflehouse.com/funfacts.asp

So...we know they need to be shredded. The Chili Parlors in St. Louis serve a breakfast potatoe which are made up out of sort of an au gratin style potatoe which would be embarrassing but they do a nice job with them. I would suggest only getting them covered in gravy. Courtesy has good traditional hash browns which I once again reccomend with cheese and onions. Billies downtown does a breakfast potatoe but they kind of crush them and fry them up well so that they are almost edible.

I believe in the nobility of the hash brown. I believe in a hot griddle because that of course is key. I believe in an middle aged woman pushing them around on that grill, avoiding the breakfast sausage, bacon and eggs but using their grease. I will eat Mc Donalds hash browns but do not...believe in them.

*I had some criticism from the ever vigilant Mr. Tiemann regarding my use of "Potatoe."
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Potatoe" is an archaic spelling of the word potato as a variant form, with the most recent usage cited from 1880: "She found the parson in his garden..making a potatoe pie for the winter." However, it is considered a misspelling in modern English. Although the English plural potatoes is spelt with an "e", the singular form is not, and no dictionary considers potatoe to be an acceptable modern spelling.
Former United States Vice President Dan Quayle became notoriously associated with this misspelling in a June 15, 1992 incident. Quayle went to a photo op at Munoz Rivera School in Trenton, New Jersey, where he was to officiate a spelling bee by drawing flash cards and asking students to write the words on the blackboard. Twelve-year-old William Figueroa wrote potato, but Quayle prompted the student to append an "e".[1] The incident briefly made national news in the United States and became a source of entertainment for the tabloid newspapers in the United Kingdom.
For the June 25, 1992 airing of The Simpsons episode "Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish", Bart Simpson's opening blackboard punishment was hastily changed to read, "It's potato, not potatoe".