The Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur Index: School Closures Suggest A Local Alternative To The Waffle House Index

Schools closed in Reykjavík today. That happens rarely enough that it still means something when it does. Veðurstofa Íslands had issued an orange warning, which officially means dangerous conditions and non-essential travel strongly discouraged.

I went downtown anyway.

This is partly stubbornness, partly a suspicion that the warning was doing some overclaiming. Orange is supposed to signal genuine danger. Today it delivered strong wind, snow, and cold. Unpleasant, sure, but this is March in Iceland, where unpleasant is the baseline. The problem with calibrating warnings too high is the same one facing anyone who cries wolf: eventually people stop listening, and, the one time it really matters, half the city may already be on Tryggvagata getting a hot dog.

Which is where I was. The Grapevine office overlooks the Bæjarins Beztu hot dog stand. And, naturally, it was open.

This is when it struck me that Iceland already has its own version of the Waffle House Index. Waffle House is a cheap, fluorescent-lit diner chain from the American South that has turned refusing to close into something close to institutional identity. It runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and closes for essentially nothing. Craig Fugate, who ran America’s federal disaster agency FEMA, noticed this after Hurricane Charley in 2004 and turned it into an informal disaster metric. Open with a full menu: green, things are manageable. Open with limited service: yellow, the generator’s running and supplies are low. Closed: red. “If you get there and the Waffle House is closed?” Fugate said. “That’s really bad. That’s where you go to work.”

Bæjarins Beztu is Iceland’s Waffle House, except instead of 80 years of surviving hurricanes, it has 88 years of surviving everything Iceland can throw at it. Founded in 1937 by a sailor named Jón Sveinsson who switched professions after illness forced him off the sea, the stand has outlasted the Second World War, the Cold War, the 2008 crash, and enough Icelandic storms to fill a meteorological archive. It has been at the corner of Tryggvagata since the 1960s. The hot dogs are lamb, pork and beef, ordered eina með öllu if you want the remoulade, sweet mustard, ketchup, and both kinds of onion. The Guardian named it the best hot dog stand in Europe in 2006. On a busy day it moves a thousand pylsur.

So here is my proposal for a Pylsur Index. If the stand is open, whatever warning is on the board is survivable: green. If the stand is open but business is unusually thin, people have thought twice about leaving the house: yellow. And if Bæjarins Beztu is closed, stop arguing with the meteorologists and stay home: red.

Today was yellow.