On a cold Friday night, two young men, each holding a folding table, walk out of an alley next to the bar called 17-16 in downtown Auburn. As they cross the street and walk past the line of people outside of another bar, In Italy, some people in line look at them suspiciously, but others appear to know exactly where the two young men are heading and what they have planned.
When the two reach the closed storefront of Toomer’s Drugs, they set up their tables to intersect with the awning’s support poll, forming a triangle with the front of the store. When this is done, they wait, and in a few short minutes they are joined by a pair of girls carrying bags that contain Styrofoam plates, plastic utensils and tiny containers of syrup.
The group still appears to be waiting on someone, and when they hear someone to the left yell “PANCAKE GUY,” it’s clear who they are waiting for.
A 20-year-old in tight blue jeans and black zip-up hoodie arrives carrying a pan covered in tin-foil, and he’s being followed by two more people with their own tin-foil-covered pans. They place their pans on the tables and the blue jeaned, black hoodied guy smiles and yells to anyone listening, “Free pancakes!”
The guy distributing pancakes is former Auburn University student Chris Lock of Nashville, Tenn. As people stroll by the table, Lock asks them if they want pancakes. They often will take him up on his offer of free food, but not without questions.
“Why do you do this?” a visibly cold blonde asks him. “What organization are you with?”
“You guys are hungry, right?” Lock asks her back.
“Yea,” she says.
“Well then, it seems like the best way to love hungry people is to give them free food,” Lock says with a smile.
The girl looks surprised but appears convinced. But it makes sense she would be skeptical in a world where the concept of “community service” refers more to organizations trying to project a nice image. The pancake plan seems too simple.
A pair of guys walk up. After accepting the pancakes, one of them asks why Lock is doing this and what he is getting out of it.
But his friend cuts Lock’s explanation off and says, “It seems like they’re just out here to be awesome, man.”
Later that night, Lock explained his inspiration for “being awesome” is rooted in his Christian faith and is based on the simple idea of “love thy neighbor.”
“One night I came out of Skybar with two of my friends, and everybody was talking about how great the hot dogs downtown were, and how it was so great to be able to get hot dogs at two in the morning,” Lock said. “Apparently, so many people want food after they drink that there’s an entire industry that developed around it.”
This led Lock to brainstorm how he could use food to touch people in a positive way.
“Food has been a medium of love since its existence, pretty much,” Lock said. “You fed people, you loved them. If we as the church, not for a church, but as Christians want to love people, the best way to do that is to feed them.”
From this point, Lock could have gone several different directions, but he said the choice to serve pancakes did not really involve much thought.
“It just popped into my head,” Lock said. “At that time, there was no place to get breakfast food within a 10-minute drive. You’d have to go to Waffle House at the I-85 intersection or go all the way down to IHOP. There aren’t really any sanitary issues with it, like if we did eggs or bacon. There’s a chance you could cook that and have it turn out horrible, and people could get sick. Not with pancakes.”
Lock thought the idea just happened to work out conveniently.
“It just came to me, but the more that I thought about it, the more that it just worked,” Lock said. “I didn’t want to overlap with pitas, or steal the hot dog business. I wanted to not undercut anybody, and pancakes are pretty easy to mass produce.”
Lock has the mass production down to a science.
The kitchen area, which begins cooking at 11:30 p.m., is set up for maximum efficiency. Before they start cooking pancakes, they fill tiny plastic containers with syrup to hand out.
“If we use five griddles, we can produce six pancakes on each griddle,” Lock said. “It takes roughly a minute to cook them, which means we can produce 30 pancakes every minute. That’s a pancake every two seconds. I’ve been doing this a long time, so it’s kind of sad that I know that,” he said with a smile.
Lock usually has the help of 10 friends, some of them folks that he once served pancakes to that like what he’s doing and want to help out.
“We’ve had 24 (people) at one point,” Lock said. “In the winter ,it’s usually about 10 people. I would say like three in the kitchen, two walking around with the pan, and about five at the table.”
The two walking around make a lap around the downtown area and make stops at all of the lines and patios outside the bars.
They start in front of 17-16, cross East Magnolia Avenue to In Italy, head down an alley that leads them toward the Olde Auburn Ale House, cross College Street to Quixote’s, up the street toward Bodega’s, and down West Magnolia Avenue to Skybar.
Lock said the people working the lap probably give out the most pancakes, and he estimates they serve roughly 500-600 people a night between the table and the lap crew.
Julie Reichard, an undeclared freshman, carried syrup containers in a canvas bag lined with plastic behind Lock as he handed out pancakes.
She said people are surprised to see the syrup containers.
“They’re already surprised that you’ve got a pan of pancakes in front of them, but when you break out the bag full of syrup, they realize how much goes into this,” she said.
On that Friday night, amid the numerous 20-somethings, an older, homeless man walks by the table. Lock gets his attention and asks him if he wants some pancakes.
The man is confused, and it becomes clear that he’s deaf because when he speaks, he asks “Free or pay?” in a mix of sign language and mumbling.
Lock extends a plate to the man and says, “Free.”
