The Jaffle Crisis

If you are a someone who lives in the Park City area, then skiing at the Canyons isn’t really about the skiing; it’s about the Belgian Waffle House. This delicious, Park City favorite, has been located at the top of the Red Pine Gondola for as long as some residents can remember - until now. As of last year, the famous Bruges Waffles have been replaced with something called a “Jafflz” hut.

These disgusting, overpriced, stale sandwiches are the new attraction at the top of the Gondola. The local skiers are outraged after this switch, and a few were interviewed for their stories. On Saturday, after skiing for two hours, two teens who have been regularly skiing at the Canyons for their whole lives, stopped into this hut for a snack. For the absurd price of eight dollars, Caroline Powell and Bianca Festavan received a burnt sandwich about the size of the average five-year old’s fist. Bianca says, “We were starving, so we bought them, even if they were expensive.” so they sat down in the broken down, metal chairs outside of the “restaurant” (more like a shack...) and ate their jaffles.

After one or two bites, Caroline noticed that hers was really chewy and had way too much apple in it (she had ordered the apple pie jaffle). Bianca, who had gotten the S’mores jaffle, couldn’t take the massive amounts of artificial marshmallow flavoring clogging up the inside of hers. Bianca said, “I thought, 'Maybe I just got a bad jaffle.' So I switched with Caroline, and she ate some of mine while I ate some of hers.” After a few more grueling and excessively chewy bites of each other's jaffles, she concluded, “Nope. They were just disgusting.”

“Even the restaurant was worn down,” says local skier, Douglas. “I was almost afraid of the food that came out of it - it seemed unsafe.” The poorly heated jaffles were being kept in a small, shabby oven in an attempt to heat them. “I wanted to get the breakfast jaffle, but there were eggs in it, and I was honestly scared of getting food poisoning.”

Even though most locals and tourists disliked the Jafflz, there are people who disagree, like Paxton Juhlin, who says, “They’re great, because they’re portable.” But is having the advantage of not using a fork worth the risk of probable food poisoning?

Overall, the horrible Jafflz hut can be described perfectly with a quote from Bianca: “It was so hard I could throw it at a wall. I wanted to throw it at a wall. It was like eating a squishy, burnt rock.” Her statement was concluded with this sentence: “When ranking it out of ten, I would give it a negative six.”

By Cami Burke and Caroline Powell