Beloved breakfast chain Waffle House is expanding across Texas with more than a dozen new restaurants planned for the Lone Star State. But those in San Antonio are still left asking what the Alamo City has to do to be included in the mix.

A recent filing with the Texas Department of Licensing and Registration (TDLR) shows yet another location headed to Texas, this time in Splendora — a small city of just over 1,000 people north of Houston. Work on the $300,000 restaurant is expected to begin in July of 2027 and wrap up by the end of that year. 

According to data website ScrapeHero, there are 132 Waffle Houses currently serving Texans — none of them in San Antonio — and an exhaustive list of TDLR filings shows many more coming down the pipeline in 2027.

In North Texas alone, there are diners in the works on top of nearly 70 existing locations listed on the chain’s website. Filings place the new ones in Anna, Fort Worth, Haslet, Princeton, Melissa, Waxahachie, Denton and more. A Waffle House in Little Elm is likely to open sometime soon, as TDLR lists the project as closed, though an opening date has yet to be announced. 

Central Texas will see two more in the coming months, with one restaurant headed for the Austin suburb of Liberty Hill this December, and another planned for Hillsboro, just north of Waco on I-35. The Austin area is already home to several Waffle Houses — one on Ben White Boulevard near Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, one near  U.S. Highway 290, another on Dessau Road, and three in Manor, Round Rock and Kyle. 

Other than the filing for Splendora, TDLR reveals that the Houston area is expecting several more locations in suburbs like Buna, New Caney, Porter, Royse City, Liberty and Kingwood. The chain’s website lists 40 existing locations in the H-Town bubble.

It’s even led to viral online hoaxes, attempting to convince San Antonians that their wishes have been answered. Back in July 2025, a fake retail site plan was posted to the r/sanantonio subreddit claiming that a Waffle House was joining a very real development at Potranco Road and State Highway 211. The purported site plan showed confirmed tenants, like Chick-fil-A and Andy’s Frozen Custard, but a developer told MySA the image was digitally altered, adding that he hadn’t had a conversation with the chain.

One reason why residents yearn for Waffle House as much as they do is that the diners are open 24/7 and tend not to close, even in severe weather. The chain’s loyalists sometimes measure the severity of a natural disaster based on whether nearby Waffle Houses are still open — a litmus test affectionately dubbed the “Waffle House index.”

MySA reached out to Waffle House for comment, but did not hear back at the time of publication. It seems that San Antonians will be sticking to a classic breakfast taco or a late-night Whataburger run for the time being.Â