IHOP's kinder, gentler novelty fat food: Cheesecake-stuffed Pancake Stackers: "
Snicker if you want, but IHOP matters to me. My parents used to take me there for breakfast on weekends -- when I was really young and we had moved an hour away from their friends to live at our aspirational suburban address. I remember meeting aunties and uncles of all kinds of real and imagined relation. We sat at a big table, under huge dark beams that made the restaurant look like a cathedral, and I ate faraway-sounding foods like German pancakes and Spanish omelets. I loved it. For a kid eating Chinese food at home every night, the International House of Pancakes felt like a window to all the exotic tastes of the world. Back then, I was too young to know or care that the Spanish omelet was just eggs with canned salsa.
Salon - http://www.salon.com/rss/all_salon.rss