Hot off the griddle

Original Pancake House
18453 Yorba Linda Boulevard
Yorba Linda, California 92686
714-693-1390

1418 East Lincoln Avenue
Anaheim, California 92805
714-535-9815

1756 South Pacific Coast Hwy.
Redondo Beach, California 90277
310-543-9875

No, do NOT get this place confused with IHOP. It's the Original Pancake House, a small chain of restaurants that offer a wide variety of pancakes and other breakfast items with an emphasis on homestyle cooking. I'm not sure which location is the real OG (there are over 100 locations across the US, I just listed a few SoCal locations), but I'm sure all of them are as good as the one I frequent in Yorba Linda.

The place itself is nothing spectacular, a very simple dining room with an open kitchen in the corner. The servers don't try to veil their impatience with fake cheer, and at times borderline the "rude waitress" stereotype you see in movies. This is not an insult to their service, because I much prefer keepin' it real. But what really brings me back to the place is their pancakes.

At the Original Pancake House, pancakes taste like how they should taste. They don't try to lure people in with gigantic portions or mounds of sugary fruit-like toppings; their perfectly fluffy buttermilk pancakes do all the talking. Their menu is truly international, offering French crepes, Alaskan sourdough flap jacks, lacy Swedish pancakes with lingonberry sauce, Dutch babies, and of course, good ole fashioned American hotcakes in every variety you can think of. Everything tastes like it came from Ma's kitchen because it did; all of the recipes come from housewives of the nationality represented in the dish. So their Danish Kijafa crepes is the creation of a Danish housewife, their Dutch baby is the spawn of a German housewife, these are all authentic cultural dishes. Take that IHOP.

My taste preference gravitates towards sweet, so I usually order banana and chocolate chip pancakes (a half stack of each, I'm not a heffer). The combination of chocolate melting over bananas is perfect! Although I've tried a few others, I tend go back to my usual. However, I have made it a goal to try all of the varieties. This task has been very difficult for me because they're only open for breakfast (6am-2pm) and my biological alarm clock doesn't go off till noon.

Besides pancakes, OPH offers all your other typical breakfast items like eggs, bacon, and waffles. But who goes to a pancake house without getting pancakes? That's like going to Cheesecake Factory and not ordering cheesecake...it's just wrong.