FOLEY — Waffles R Wild has opened a second Foley restaurant, cutting a ribbon on a location in the city’s downtown district and moving the concept off the OWA property where it first went brick-and-mortar.
The new storefront brings the restaurant’s 1930s speakeasy theme and its menu of sweet and savory waffle dishes to downtown Foley. The original location remains at Downtown OWA, giving the business two addresses within the same city.
From Food Truck to Two Storefronts
The concept was founded by owner Danielle Duemmel and her parents, and it started as a food truck before growing into a restaurant. Duemmel studied culinary arts at Monroe Community College.
That progression — truck first, building second — has become one of the more reliable paths into the restaurant business, and for good reason. A truck lets an owner test a menu and build a following at a fraction of the capital a dining room requires, with far lower fixed costs if the concept needs to change. By the time a successful truck signs a lease, it is not opening cold; it arrives with a proven product and customers who already know the name.
Doing it twice in one city is a further step. A second location means duplicating a kitchen, a staff and a set of standards without the owner able to stand in both rooms at once, which is generally the point at which a small restaurant becomes a small business with management layers.
Two Foley Addresses, Two Different Rooms
The two locations sit in genuinely different environments. Downtown OWA is the retail and dining district attached to the OWA resort and amusement destination on the east side of Foley, where much of the traffic is visitors and families already out for the day.
Downtown Foley is the city’s traditional commercial core, with a customer base that leans more toward residents, weekday workers and shoppers moving through on their own errands. A restaurant that works in both is serving two fairly distinct rhythms — destination traffic on one side of town, neighborhood traffic on the other.
The 1930s Speakeasy Theme
The restaurant’s design leans on a 1930s speakeasy motif, a decor language built around the era of Prohibition, which ended nationally in 1933. Speakeasy styling — low light, dark wood, period detailing, a sense of a room behind a door — has become a durable restaurant convention because it does something practical: it makes a small space feel intentional and makes an evening drink feel like an occasion.
Pairing that with waffles is the concept’s central joke and its central strategy. It lets a single room read as a breakfast spot in the morning and a bar in the evening without changing addresses.
Waffles Past Breakfast
The menu takes waffles well beyond traditional breakfast, running to sweet and savory gourmet creations alongside craft cocktails and all-day dining.
The economics behind that are straightforward. A restaurant that serves only breakfast is competing for a few hours a day; a restaurant built on a format that can carry dessert, entrees and late-night food can fill a dining room from morning through evening on the same equipment and the same core ingredient. All-day dining also removes the awkward mid-afternoon gap that closes many small kitchens between services.
A Weekly Calendar, Not Just a Menu
The new location is being programmed as well as staffed. Plans call for a full calendar of weekly activities, including trivia nights, family game nights, happy hour specials and weekend entertainment.
Regular programming is a well-established way for an independent restaurant to build predictable traffic on the nights that are otherwise slow. A trivia night converts a quiet Tuesday into a reservation-worthy evening, family game nights bring in a demographic that eats early, and a recurring schedule gives regulars a reason to attach a weekday to the restaurant’s name.
What It Adds Downtown
For downtown Foley, the addition is a locally owned, all-day operation with a bar program and a reason for people to be on the sidewalk after dark — the kind of tenant that small downtowns across Baldwin County have been actively courting as the county’s population has grown.
For the business, it is a second bet on the same city rather than an expansion into a new market, which suggests the owners see room in Foley for both a resort-adjacent location and a downtown one.