Pancake Cafe, Naperville

Pancake Cafe
1292 Rickert Dr # 168
Naperville, IL 60540
http://www.pancakecafenaperville.com/

 August 6, 2012

Tucked away in an unassuming Naperville strip mall, Pancake Cafe might just be the most quintessential pancake house we've come across to date. Mirrored walls, aged wooden booths, stained glass lighting and brass fixtures, this place has it all. I don't want to call it a dive, but the dark ambiance and unassuming design give it a soul-sucking charm, if you're into that sort of thing. Step in here and you could be inside any one of thousands of different restaurants just like it, so familiar and comfortable it feels that you'll be right at home, even if it's your first time inside. The menu is kinda boring, but I wasn't let down by my three berry crepes. Kinda hard to mess something like that up, I guess. Service was just fine, nothing to write home about but perfectly adequate. Unless you've been raised exclusively on Richard Walker's or Honey Jam, you won't walk out disappointed in your dining experience.

As for me, I got the cinnamon roll pancakes.  Maybe I've been spoiled by the cinnamon roll French toast at Mother's, which is drenched in icing and comes with a side of cinnamon sugar butter (mmm) but I found these pancakes to be...lacking.  Not that they were bad, mind you.  They tasted fine.  But they were basically regular pancakes dusted with some cinnamon sugar, with a little squirt of icing on top.  There wasn't much cinnamon-roll-ness about them, none of the over-the-top decadence that I've come to expect from items bearing the title of "cinnamon roll."  Sorta wish I'd gone with the banana crepes (which I've gotten here before, and which are excellent.)

This restaurant chain has two locations, that I know of:  one here, and one in Lemont.  For various reasons, I prefer the one in Naperville.  Despite my lukewarm review, I do consider this restaurant worth a visit.  Nice ambiance, quality food, and good service.  Really, that's all I need from a breakfast place.  It's also quite a bit nicer-looking on the inside than the outside, so it's a bit of a hidden gem.  Check it out if you're in the area.  

Anthony's Pancake House, Lockport

Anthony's Pancake House &; Restaurant
1030 E 9th St.
Lockport, IL 60441

Well, it looks like you've got to be a webmaster to have a decent-looking blog on Blogger anymore. Used to be you could just upload your photos straight to your blog, and then it was easy to work them in to your entry however you wanted. It was really intuitive and simple and easy to understand, and I think that everyone was happy with it. Some time in the past year, they changed everything, so now I don't have any idea how to post a picture and then begin my text below it. That's how I always wanted to do this and I'm more than a little annoyed and resentful that doing this is no longer as simple as it once was. Once you post a picture, it's almost as though you're forced to begin your paragraph alongside it until you reach the end of it. Only then are you free to type normal paragraphs uninterrupted by pictures. I'll admit that this looks good some of the time but it's not what I want to do here and I haven't found a way around it yet. And posting pictures side by side? Forget about it! It comes out looking like this:

Really, all I want to do is post these pictures side by side (which we used to do all the time), but apparently that's not an option anymore and the pictures can only display like this, stacked on top of each other with lots of negative space on the side. We've had this blog for years but now our entries look like hot garbage written by idiots who don't know what they're doing or don't care that it looks bad. Maybe everyone reads blogs on their smartphones now and is used to webpages being manged like this? I sure hope not but I wouldn't know.

I don't know when everything changed here. Now we have to upload our pictures to Picasa before linking them to the blog. Yeah, I know that's where they were always uploading to in the first place but this just seems like a pointless extra step.

We started this entry nine months ago and forgot about it until now, so I can't tell you much about Anthony's other than it's a pretty average family restaurant with good, cheap breakfast served all day long. I don't remember their hours, either. We had blueberry pancakes and pigs in a blanket. Each was acceptably good. That's about all I can say. Sorry this wasn't a very helpful entry.

One item of note is the fact that Anthony's is but a stone's throw or two down the street from another pancake house, Honey Field, which is on our short list of pancake houses to try next. Who will come out on top? Stay tuned for this showdown of breakfast titans...

Pancakes Eggcetera, Rosemont