Buttermilk pancakes were a “day-one” item when Luella’s Southern Kitchen first opened in Chicago in 2015, explains owner Darnell Reed; nevertheless, they eventually came off the menu as the restaurant focused on dinner service. But when Reed re-opened Luella’s in a new location last year with an exclusive focus on brunch, he put pancakes back on the menu — albeit with a slight revamp.
Instead of the traditional diner-style stack, they’re now extra-tall golden-brown cakes, two to an order, and slightly rounded on the edges. “Our recipe has not changed,” Reed says. What has changed is the process: “We bake them in cast-iron skillets versus on the griddle.”
At trendy restaurants across the country, big stacks of pancakes have given way to single (or double at most) super-thick, showstopper pancakes, formed to a pan, and often accompanied by creative add-ons and toppings. See the masa pancakes at New York City’s Hellbender; the malted “big pancake” at Philadelphia’s Middle Child Clubhouse, topped with butter formed into a smiley face; and the thick ricotta pancakes at Washington, D.C.’s Osteria Morini, which can be topped with lemon curd and blueberries, or pancetta and a poached egg to evoke pasta carbonara.
Tank and Libby’s, a breakfast restaurant in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, is garnering attention for its domed “souffle”-style pancakes, though they’re not to be confused with the jiggly Japanese souffle pancakes of the late 2010s. The big-pancake moment is a global fascination right now — at breakfast spots in Toronto; Pueblo, Mexico; Manila, Philippines; and Tokyo. The popular recipe developer Paris Starn recently even created a “big-pan pancake series.”
Though it didn’t invent this style of pancake, NYC’s Golden Diner, which opened in 2019, certainly popularized it in recent years. Thanks to massive success on social media, the restaurant has recently become synonymous with its honey-butter pancakes. They’re cartoonishly pudgy, evenly bronzed, and glossed with honey-maple butter, and people wait hours for them.
To make these pancakes, cooks at Golden Diner pour batter leavened with yeast into nonstick pans that are preheated on a griddle. With the batter constrained to a small pan, as opposed to flowing freeform on the griddle itself, the cake has nowhere to go but up, giving the pancakes fluffiness, height, and that signature flying-saucer shape. After the edges brown, the pancake is transferred to the salamander, which radiates heat evenly to cook the pancake’s other side without it having to be flipped manually. Once it’s fully cooked, the pancake is turned onto a plate, thick and domed.
“We liked the aesthetic of it,” says Golden Diner chef and owner Sam Yoo, who previously cooked pancakes in this style at other restaurants. Not only does this process maximize height, but it also results in a more even color, since cooking directly on a griddle subjects pancakes to hotspots, he explains. Unlike Japanese souffle pancakes, Yoo wanted a pancake that was light and fluffy, but still had body. Souffle pancakes, which are raised with egg whites, felt “too much like a meringue” to him. His pancake, he says, “eats more like a pancake.”
Still, if the success of the Japanese souffle pancake taught us any lessons, it’s that diners love a visually compelling pancake, both in a crowded dining room and on social media. This was why Reed of Luella’s decided to change his approach. “I saw myself that [this style] was going viral,” he says, referencing Golden Diner. “When I saw that people were doing that, honestly, I felt like I didn’t want anybody to have the upper hand on us.” He knew people already liked his pancakes, but he wanted to make them fit the moment. “It was kind of a competitive thing,” Reed says.
For restaurants, this style of making pancakes can offer some operational benefits. Given the small size of Golden Diner’s kitchen — plus its large menu, with burgers and quesadillas requiring plancha time, too — the pan approach allows for a “cleaner” process, Yoo explains. “Our line is extremely tight,” he says.
In uptown Manhattan, at Cocina Consuelo, the thick, fruit-topped masa pancake, which is served as a single piece, has made the diminutive restaurant a destination. Unlike Golden Diner’s pancake, it’s cooked entirely on the stove. “All we have is a 36-inch griddle,” says chef and co-owner Karina Garcia. “That was the only choice that I had: to make it big and just one, because I wouldn’t have space to do anything else on the flat-top.” It was developed out of space constraints: Confining the pancake to a pan allows other dishes to take priority when needed.
One recent acolyte of Golden Diner is London’s Bara Cafe, a new bakery that emphasizes Welsh produce. After seeing an article about the restaurant’s pancakes, “I thought maybe we’ll do our own take,” says co-owner Cissy Dalladay. In keeping with Bara’s ethos, it features Welsh honey. The Golden Diner-inspired approach was the only way Dalladay considered making pancakes at Bara. “I’ve cooked a lot of pancakes in my life, and these are the best ones,” she says. Not only do they turn out more consistent, but also, “this way of doing them is much more streamlined,” allowing cooks to multitask while the pancakes finish cooking in the oven.
The approach has its challenges though, especially at scale. Mainly, it takes more time. At Luella’s, the pancake goes in the oven for between 13 and 15 minutes, which can be trickier when coordinating multiple dishes for one table; it’s faster to put out shrimp and grits than a pancake.
“We do get bottlenecks because we obviously weren’t planning to become a viral restaurant known for its pancakes,” Yoo says, noting that the pancake was one of the last dishes he developed for Golden Diner’s opening. “It definitely slows us down because we can only produce so much,” he adds. At busy times, the restaurant has to limit takeout pancake orders to make sure that the restaurant itself can stay on top of the pancakes. “Basically, the cook who is making pancakes is making pancakes non-stop during the shift,” he says.
The big pancake trend extends to savory options, too. In Philadelphia, Cambodian seafood restaurant Sao has become known for its honey-butter hoe cake, which is topped with smoked trout salad and trout roe; about 80 percent of tables order it, typically to share. Cooks at Sao pour pancake batter made with cornmeal and dashi into a pan on the stovetop, then finish it in the oven. Though the hoe cake is inspired by the johnnycake at Boston’s Neptune Oyster, chef Phila Lorn wanted a thicker texture in order to steep it with honey butter. “It’s almost the mindset of tres leches,” he says.
The rise of this pancake style may also be a way of adapting to changing ordering behaviors — particularly, that in the shared-plates era, diners are more keen to pass around a big thick pancake for a few bites each rather than to order a stack of pancakes for themselves. Osteria Morini built the pancake section of its brunch menu with the idea that three- and four-tops would get them to share. Similarly, the retro-style izakaya Dancerobot in Philadelphia describes the thick-but-airy sourdough pancake on its recently launched brunch menu as a “table pancake.”
Pancake stacks have shrunk even at restaurants that don’t take the ultra-thick approach. While creative director Lily Rosenthal Royal was inspired by the Golden Diner pancake during early development for Los Angeles’s new diner Max & Helen’s, chef Nancy Silverton wanted “the complete opposite,” Rosenthal Royal recalls: not a big, fluffy white-flour pancake, but a thinner pancake that was “intricate with spelt and different types of flour.”
Silverton’s preference won, and that pancake is available either single or as a stack of two. Single is the more-ordered option, either for the table or as part of the Larchmont Slam plate, which includes eggs as well as bacon or sausage. “I’m finding that most people are not really ordering pancakes as their main,” she says, noting the strong cultural focus on protein. “It’s less people ordering them as the full breakfast, and more like, ‘Let’s get a pancake to taste it.’”
At Luella’s, some diners don’t know what to expect from the pancakes when they order them. But when people see the size of them, Reed says, “It turns into a shared thing.”
