The Blueberry Hill Pancake House, Darien

Blueberry Hill Pancake House
7340 S. Route 83
Darien, Illinois 60559

April 23, 2007



The Blueberry Hill Pancake House is easy to miss, lodged in a tiny stripmall. I was a little disappointed to see this. Stand-alone restaurants, to me, just seem classier. This may not be a fair or accurate judgment, but when you see a restaurant sitting next to some grimy little dollar store or a dry cleaners, it kind of kills that cozy, homespun mystique that pancake houses are supposed to have. Once you enter the restaurant, however, it's like entering a portal into another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound, but of taste.



As you might expect, the Blueberry Hill Pancake House is very blue on the inside. The menu offers a good array of choices, from the mundane to the unusual. I got blueberry banana pancakes. Going to the Blueberry Hill Pancake House (man, I'm already starting to get tired of typing that out) and not getting an item with blueberries in it is sort of like going to Pizza Hut for the salad bar. Or going to Red Lobster and ordering a hamburger. You can do it, but if it's your first visit you want to taste what the restaurant is famous for.



The pancakes were quite tasty, and there was plenty of them. I had to bring home leftovers. Joe got the blueberry french toast, one of the specials. I tasted it, and it was quite moist and dense, almost more like bread pudding than french toast. It came with a sweet cream cheese sauce which reminds me a little of that frosting that comes with the cinnamon french toast at Mother's. Sometimes, the line between breakfast and dessert is a thin and blurry one.

The prices were pretty reasonable.



Joe here. I enjoyed our trip to Blueberry Hill, but hey, I love blueberries. You can get them on almost anything here, and the prices are pretty good, too. Well, they would have been even better if we had remembered to print out the coupon on their website. I'd definitely recommend it and I know that we'll be going back for more again soon. Afternoon stragglers beware: all locations close at 3:00 pm every day. Maybe that's normal? I probably just need to start getting up earlier.