Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Bye IHOP

slowly we are saying goodbye to some of the places we like to go. one of them being IHOP (i.e. the international house of pancakes)... :) not every week of course. just every now and then! we got up really early on sunday, and we were rewarded for that; the restaurant was still pretty empty. coming in a little later on the weekend and the place is packed, with many waiting to be seated (which luckily goes relatively fast). to us, such breakfast places with too much food for not that much money and cheerful waitresses are really american. something i will miss when back home.... (although being able to get great bread and pastries just about everywhere is a nice alternative)
a full thermos of coffee and pancakes, eggs, hash browns, bacon..... hmmmmmm.... the above is just 9 dollars, and then something for the coffee. we shared the middle plate, but each had our own pancakes. far too much food, but oh so good! in the beginning i was overwhelmed by all the choices you always have here. you cannot just order something, everything has to be specified; how do you want your eggs? bacon or sausage? etc etc... nowadays i often can just tell the waitress what i want, and dont need to have them tell me all the options (often far too fast so i miss half of it), followed by eehmmm, uuhhhhmmm.. hmmm, ok, i'll take that.... im pretty proud of that... :) i now also like that you have options, and literally can order things exactly the way YOU want it, not the way the restaurant always prepares it (which is usually not the case in the netherlands). dressing on the side? sure! whole wheat bread instead of white? absolutely! no cheese? we'll take care of it! and if its not exactly the way you ordered it, they take it back without a problem (usually.. :) ).

4 comments:

Pierre BOYER said...

It remember me "Perkins" where I used to take an american breakfast...
Best regards from France,

Pierre

biebkriebels said...

An american breakfast is more a kind of brunch I think and even for the whole day maybe...Can't imagine to have eggs with the pancakes. All those choices made me mad in the beginning, had the same problem as you, couldn't understand what she said so quickly and when she repeated I still didn't know what she was talking about. Well, every country has its own habits.

Manon said...

Unfortunately there're no Perkins restaurants in Massachusetts. I just found out there're three in Virginia, at least one hour away from us. IHOP is closer by ;) We always avoid the Sunday morning breakfast rush by having 'linner', around 3PM.

Kate said...

Such a nice morning ritual. When my husband and I were first dating, we would go for early morning rides in his convertible. Now that we've been married for 51 years, he refuses to rise to see the morning sunrise! Things have a tendency to change!

Re. the food; American course are too large, don't you think? Part of our obesity problem is created by our large portions.k More of a "curse" in disguise.