Review: IHOP - Cinna-stack pancakes

Personally, I would have liked my first review to have been somewhere a bit more adventurous and unconventional than IHOP. Perhaps a family run diner, with a pancake recipe handed down from generation to generation. Or maybe a hot new food truck, putting a creative new spin on the old classic recipe. Not that I'm a snooty food critic by any means. Trust me, I love IHOP. I just would have preferred to have gone outside the box a little bit. Regardless, today several of my coworkers wanted to go for breakfast, and the popular choice was IHOP.

I flipped through the menu, ignoring all the varieties of omelettes my coworkers would debate over, heading straight to the pancake section. Why go to a pancake house and get eggs? Before long I settled on the Cinna-stack pancakes. The description read as follows:

Our signature stack of four buttermilk pancakes, layered with a delicious cinnamon roll filling, then drizzled with rich cream cheese icing before being crowned with whipped topping.

My plate arrived, looking not much like the wonderful picture in the menu (the picture I have provided is, unfortunately, the menu picture, as my phone decided to die on me). The pancakes were thin and wimpy, slopped together. The whip cream simply came in a side bowl (not bad if you don't want all that cream, but a buzzkill for the visual presentation). The flavours of the cinnamon roll filling and cream cheese icing were good, but the cinnamon roll filling was slopped on so thickly I could not even taste the actual pancakes. Probably a good thing, as they were mere shadows of the pancakes represented throughout the menus bright pictures. Overall, the idea was good, and the flavours well represented. Unfortunately, the execution failed. Too much filling, masking poorly prepared pancakes.

- Jack