Ever since he was a child visiting family in Poland, Wally Strzepka has loved waffles.
“They had these waffle stands everywhere, and I was in awe of them. It just mesmerized me. I don’t know why. I can’t explain it,” he said in a phone interview Thursday. “You could smell the aroma from a distance. It was just so simple, and something about pouring batter into an iron and out comes a delicious waffle [that] triggered the fire in me.”
When his father later bought him a waffle maker, Strzepka said he played around with it as a kid, but the checkered treats didn’t become his thing until 2008, when at age 20 he started making waffles for friends and family.
Years later, in March 2016, he started Wally’s Waffles as a side business to fill a niche he had noticed in the Chicagoland food scene.
“You see cookies, ice cream, cinnamon buns, stuff like that, but nothing with gourmet waffles,” Strzepka said. “I was trying to find a restaurant to try a real Belgian waffle in Chicago. I couldn’t find anything, so I figured I’d just do it myself. I started unofficially catering small events. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was carrying stuff in grocery bags. I didn’t know how to use a warmer. I didn’t know how electricity worked; I was always blowing fuses. It was a train wreck.”
Strzepka quickly became a certified food vendor so he could operate his pop-up stand at the Brookfield Farmers Market, where each year since he has sold gourmet waffles and waffle-based dishes, both sweet and savory. Wally’s Waffles posts its pop-up locations each month on its website.
Now, eight years into the business, Wally and his waffles are reaching new heights. Strzepka, alongside his sister Maggie Strzepka and their friend Joe Caiafa, took to the national stage as competitors on — and, by the end, the winners of — the 17th season of “The Great Food Truck Race,” which aired this summer on the Food Network. The show is available on demand or to stream on Max and Hulu.
Each year, teams of three with varying amounts of restaurant or culinary experience compete in cooking challenges that take them to different cities across the United States in custom food trucks. Every week, the teams race to design custom menus, often under challenging restraints, and earn the highest profits from selling their dishes on the street. By the final episode of the season, two remaining teams compete for a $50,000 cash prize.
Getting on the show
Strzepka said casting producers from the show reached out to Wally’s Waffles in autumn 2022 to ask if he would be interested in competing on season 16 of the show. While the waffle slinger and his team submitted an application, they didn’t hear back until the next year, when they went through the same process but this time were cast on the show.
Going into filming, Strzepka said he didn’t expect the Wally’s Waffles team to succeed on the show, never mind take home the first-place trophy and a $50,000 prize to boot.
“In the first week[s], we actually got first place two days in a row, so that was very challenging. If you watch the show, we had a lot of problems with getting the product out that we wanted and struggling with the food truck. We didn’t really know how to maneuver in there and who would do what, and by some miracle, we pulled it together.”
As the weeks progressed, other teams were eliminated, until only Wally’s Waffles and another team, Bao Bei, remained in the finale. Strzepka said Bao Bei often won challenges across the season that boosted the money in their till, leading the Wally’s Waffles team to doubt themselves going into the final episode.
“We really didn’t think we would have what it takes to beat them creatively in challenges. Going into it, we were hopeful. I wouldn’t say we were as confident as we should have been,” he said. “Up to this point in the race, we had only won, I think, one challenge. Bao Bei had won about 11 throughout the entire course of the race. There were three challenges total in the finale. We lost two, but the one challenge that we won is the one challenge that set us up for the win.”
As the underdogs in the finale, Strzepka said he and his team were in “utter shock” when they learned they had beat Bao Bei and earned the $50,000 prize. He said the show captured their real reactions to the news.
“It’s an indescribable feeling. It’s almost a mixed feeling of joy, and excitement for the future, and … relief, I guess, that it was all over with.”
Wally’s a winner
Coming away from the show, Strzepka said he and his team learned how to streamline the culinary process together and how to think on the spot to meet the strict challenge requirements. But he learned something else that applies just as much to a reality TV competition as it does real life.
“One of the most important things I think that we all learned from the show is how important hospitality, customer service and just treating people with respect is, when it comes to any business, but importantly in restaurants,” he said. “Food should be a focus. However, I think, a lot of times, too much focus is put on the food, and people forget about treating people with proper hospitality and talking to people like normal people, not trying to sell [to] them. Just showing that you care about your customers.”
Strzepka said Wally’s Waffles is feeling its “15 minutes of fame” with increased demand — sometimes doing double or even triple the amount of business compared to before the show — and customers traveling from as far as Pittsburgh to try the waffles they saw on the show. He said the team is most focused on meeting that demand for the moment, but with his eye to the future, Strzepka said he hopes to hire more people on to be able to run multiple Wally’s Waffle stands at the same time.
In the longer term, he said he hopes to see the brand run its own food truck, like on the show, before potentially opening a “brick-and-mortar cafe.” If everything goes Strzepka’s way, he said he dreams of Wally’s Waffles becoming a national franchise with locations at major airports across the country due to the level of foot traffic.
But for the moment, Strzepka said, the plan is to take “baby steps” toward expansion and avoid potential growing pains while staying true to what Wally’s Waffles does best.
“We’re just going to keep on waffling,” he said.
