After our two day backroads roundabout route from our home in East Tennessee, to St. Louis Missouri and a visit with Laurie’s family, we finally made it. It was an interesting and mostly stress free, traffic wise. Still, we were looking forward to staying in one place for a few days while we enjoyed some family time.
Of
course, this part of our trip started with food!
Bonnie
and Bill always serve nice upscale meals…something that we look forward
to! In this case Bill had prepared a
nice Caprese salad for each of us. It’s
hard to beat heirloom tomatoes, fresh mozzarella and basil leaves with a nice
balsamic glaze…
Bonnie
knows that I can’t eat greens due to one of my medications. So she roasted some colorful and tasty
carrots as our hot vegetable for dinner.
They were excellent…and I went for a third helping too.
The
entrée was simple but luscious. The
garlic butter shrimp scampi with pasta hit all the high notes for us! I had two large helpings and it was so good
that I was tempted to go for a third, but common sense took over.
This was
Laurie’s plate. She is so much neater
and her plate is almost always more photogenic than mine tends to be… Another
welcome side to our meal was a nice crusty loaf of fresh bakery bread with some
quality butter.
So…next
we have more food!
Ah, memories! Laurie and I moved from the St. Louis area to Chicago over 40 years ago. But when Bill and Bonnie took us to “The Original Pancake House in St. Louis, it was like old home week. This always was one of our favorite breakfast spots when we lived in the area.
After we
moved to Chicago, we enjoyed dining at a couple different “Walker Brothers
Pancake House” locations. We’ve been
living in East Tennessee for 14 years now…
Sadly “The Original Pancake House” or it’s more upscale “Walker Brothers
Pancake House” franchises are not anywhere to be found in our area. I was hopeful when I checked Tennessee and Nebraska
(our son’s family home) for either of these restaurants… No luck!
Bonnie
isn’t a big breakfast person…so she was happy to learn that she could order
from the Kid’s menu. She went with the “Simply
Perfect Breakfast”. ($9.25) It features a scrambled egg, a slice of bacon and
either French toast or pancakes and Bonnie opted for the latter… For her, it was a ‘right size’ breakfast.
Bill does
like a full breakfast. In his case he
ordered the “Sausage Lovers Breakfast”. ($17.75) It included 3 over-easy eggs,
2 sausage patties, 2 sausage links and hash brown potatoes. Oh yes, it also comes with 3 buttermilk
pancakes. It certainly was a filling
morning ‘starter’.
Despite
being a fully committed carnivore, I decided to stray from my usual egg and meat
breakfast. I ordered a stack of “Blueberry
Pancakes”. ($11.25) These blueberry filled buttermilk pancakes are dusted with
powdered sugar and are served with a homemade blueberry compote. I decided that the compote would be just too
rich for my taste, so I skipped it and went for lots of butter and maple
syrup. I rarely have pancakes, so these
were a treat.
Laure
decided to order one of her favorite breakfasts…the “Eggs Benedict”. ($15.95)
The 2 basted eggs were placed on top of a slice of Canadian bacon and a toasted
Wolferman’s muffin. Then it was covered
with Hollandaise sauce and plated with a large order of hash brown
potatoes. I did have to help her with a
bit of one of those muffin halves…
The
Original Pancake House was founded in Portland Oregon in 1953 and today it has
more than 150 locations in 28 states in the USA, as well as locations in Canada,
Japan and Korea.
The
Original Pancake House continues to be a solid if not spectacular breakfast
venue. If we were on the road and one
was available, we would stop by for breakfast. It may not be fair comparing breakfast prices
in a large metropolitan area like St. Louis with the prices for comparable breakfasts
in East Tennessee, but I thought that the meal pricing was a bit high. FYI, coffee was $3.75 and a medium orange
juice was $4.75.
To locate
an Original Pancake House or Walker Brothers Pancake House near you, just go to
The Original Pancake House Home Page. If you have a really big appetite, try their
famous baked Apple Pancake. It is big and it
is rich…but very tasty indeed.
Just
click on any of the photos to enlarge them…
Thanks
for stopping by for a visit!
Take
Care, Big Daddy Dave
I adore heirloom tomatoes and carrots, the shape, colour, texture, juiciness, sweetness...all of it..just great! Bill and Bonnie eat really well. I usually break my fast in the early morning ( 6-7am) with meat, eggs and homemade broth..so a full breakfast sounds perfect to me.
ReplyDeleteYour first meal at Bonnies looks delicious. The meals at the pancake house look huge - hard to believe all those pancakes. As they say on the Jimmy Dean commercial "and when you're done you know you had something to eat."
ReplyDeleteLa comida estaba muy rica en especial la de Bonnie. Le mando un beso y les deseo un buen fin de semana.
ReplyDeleteThe food served at Bonnie and Bill's home looked delicious and sure it tasted even better, Dave, based on your seconds. Breakfast is always a favorite meal when we're traveling and the pancake place you went to seemed similar to the Mr Pancake we went to in Cape Code last week.
ReplyDelete