Mission Statement

The idea came to us as we were enjoying a fantastic pancake breakfast one winter morning in our local pancake house. See, I love pancake houses. I have fond memories of these little niche restaurants all over the country from the now gone Big Chief Diner where I grew up to the Log Cabin in Big Bear when I went to my brother’s wedding, to this little place on the Olympic Peninsula that I don’t even know the name of where I had the most sublime buckwheat pancakes I’ve ever tasted.

There are few things as American, as welcoming, as simple and good as your local pancake house. So my photographer friend and I decided we needed to document this phenomenon, this short stack of Americana. And the best way to do it was to take a cross country tour, using pancake houses as the stars by which we set our course. Every day, another pancake house as we crossed the country by back roads and small towns, one fork-full at a time. And we would document our journey in pictures, our own observations, and interviews with the staff and regulars as we went.

The journey starts in summer of 2011, but there is much planning to do. We have to do a few test runs to get our system in place. And we need to start charting the course, from Seattle to as far as we can get and back in a month. That’s where we need your help. If you have a local pancake house (not just a diner that happens to have pancakes on the menu) that you know about, tell us. For our purposes, it needs to have at least 3 kinds of pancakes on the menu. Nothing else counts.

And until we take off, we’ll be posting some of our test runs on this site, and documenting the build-up and planning. So pour yourself a cup of coffee, grab a fork, and pass the maple syrup.

The adventure starts here!