Searching for KC’s finest flapjack

I still cringe at the memory of the worst pancake I ever tasted. I was eating in a crummy dining room inside a motel that formerly stood at Eighth Street and Main. The hotcake was as thick as a Frisbee and just as tough. I shoved my uneaten stack back at my waitress.

“How can the kitchen screw up a stack of pancakes?” I asked her.

“You think those are bad,” she said. “Wait until you taste the bacon.”

A pancake doesn’t involve much more than flour, baking powder, salt, sugar, milk and an egg. (And that’s only if you’re one of the few people not relying on packaged mixes such as the Aunt Jemima brand, which the R.T. Davis Milling Company first mass-marketed in 1890, when the company’s headquarters were in St. Joseph.) But there’s an art to making a good one. I know this because mastering the pancake marked my first — my only — success as a line cook. (The gig was pretty short-lived.)

My mentor, a gruff, no-nonsense guy who had honed his cooking skills in the Navy, revealed his secret for perfect pancakes: The grill must be hot but not too hot, and a thin scrim of grease or oil on the flattop is superior to butter, which scorches. The batter shouldn’t have too much milk or cream or too much air — “Use a wooden spoon, never a whisk,” he told me. The art is in knowing exactly when to take a spatula and flip the flapjack over. The longer a pancake sits on the grill, the chewier and denser it becomes.

I can still make a decent pancake at home, but I’m a firm believer that the best pancakes are those served in restaurants. The pancake is a classic comfort food: It’s filling, loaded with carbohydrates and typically inexpensive. A perfect one doesn’t sit like a lump of lead in your belly. Instead, it’s satisfying enough to energize and to ward off hunger until afternoon.

When the conversation turns to griddle cakes, I like to give a shout-out to the venerable IHOP, the chain that has served hotcakes for a half century. The downside, of course, is that most IHOP dining rooms are dreary and uncomfortable and loaded with small children. (I don’t tolerate temperamental toddlers until well after noon.)

A steaming, butter-drenched short stack seemed like an excellent way to meet a Saturday morning once the weather began to cool. My editor agreed that pancake season had arrived, but he imposed limits.

“IHOP? No! It’s a chain,” he said with a grimace. Instead, we arranged to meet at Simply Breakfast early one morning — really early, at 2 a.m. We sat down to sample the flapjacks just in time to turn back the clock one hour as daylight saving time expired. He had been up all night. I had watched the only movie I know of that makes pancakes a subplot — the 1934 version of Imitation of Life, which was hot stuff for its day — and retired early to dream about good syrup. I set the alarm to give me enough time to drive to Westport (which I knew would be loaded with intoxicated revelers) and find a parking spot close to the restaurant. Parking is at a premium in Westport after midnight, especially when there’s an extra wee hour built into the party.

Simply Breakfast

Size: A saucer

Thickness: Esquire magazine

Density: Cakelike

Color: Golden brown, flawless

Syrup: Maple-flavored corn syrup

Price: $6.49 (includes sides and coffee)

Just one other table was occupied in the cavernous (and harshly lighted) room at 2 a.m. A nerdy couple was having an intimate conversation about typefaces. I dislike ordering at a counter any time of day, but it was particularly annoying at this hour, when a little friendly service might have been comforting. But there I stood, bleary-eyed, debating between the sweet-cream pancakes and the multigrain variety.

Scott chose the multigrain, which turned out to be denser and drier than the sweet-cream version. The latter looked gorgeous but were a little too sweet, as if they had been made with Duncan Hines cake mix. Both stacks were spongy and absorbent, engineered perhaps to soak up Westport booze and late-night disappointment. We both preferred the multigrain, but neither of us came close to finishing a two-cake stack. The search for alternatives was on.

[page]

Cascone’s Grill

Size: A plate

Thickness: This week’s Pitch

Density: Airy, light

Color: Light brown

Syrup: Maple Ridge maple-flavored corn syrup

Price: $3.75 for a short stack

There’s a good story behind the subtly sweet pancake recipe at the beloved Cascone’s Grill. Nearly 40 years ago, back in its original Fifth Street location, founder Sam Cascone was mixing up some custard when he was called out of the kitchen to talk to a vendor. “When he got back, he forgot what he had been making,” says his son Frank, who now runs the diner with his brother, George. “Someone said the kitchen needed pancake batter, so Dad made pancake batter out of the custard. And that’s how we’ve made pancakes ever since.”

The pancakes at Cascone’s, delectably light and fluffy, were best eaten immediately — they seemed to get heavier and doughier as they cooled. Ask for butter to dodge the blob of shiny margarine that otherwise dressed each stack.

City Diner

Size: 12-inch diameter

Thickness: Rolling Stone magazine

Density: Spongy

Color: Golden brown

Syrup: Maple-flavored corn syrup

Price: $4.55

The whitewashed brick walls in the front room of the City Diner are covered with signatures of the masters of the pancake universe: the men and women who have accomplished the feat of eating two of this restaurant’s oversized pancakes. The honorees include Daniel “Chim Chim” Jewett, Andy “I’m Just Getting Started” Duckett and Coleman “The Iron Stomach” Reed.

The cakes here were beautiful-looking but a bit doughy. They tended to be pretty hefty, too. When I asked the waitress if they were always so thick, she answered, “Sometimes worse.” Less adventurous diners can order a smaller version, which still drapes over the sides of a dinner plate. They come with Land O’Lakes margarine.

Mama’s 39th Street Diner

Size: 10-inch diameter

Thickness: The Cat in the Hat, hardcover version

Density: Fluffy

Color: Satiny light brown

Syrup: Thin, maple-flavored corn syrup

Price: $2.59 each

People seem to love or hate Mama’s 39th Street Diner, and I’m still on the fence about the place. The dishes that the kitchen executes well — breakfasts in particular — are done very well. The blue-plate specials are another story. Still, Mama’s has the most congenial vibe among midtown diners.

If you don’t mind a malty, vanilla-intense griddle cake, the pretty golden pancakes at this recently reopened diner were exceptionally good. I liked that Mama’s still served its maple-flavored syrup (it tasted like Log Cabin) in miniature clear-plastic pitchers. The cakes were served piping hot, allowing the butter — the real thing — to melt evenly.

Succotash

Size: CD-sized Swedish style or plate-sized

Thickness: New York magazine

Density: Airy and light

Color: Yellow and brown marbling

Syrup: Mrs. Butterworth’s

Price: $7 for a short stack

Beth Barden, chef-owner of the Dutch Hill bruncheonette Succotash, is proud of her two newest pancakes: a deliciously light gluten-free version (made with xanthan gum and sorghum paste) and a vegan version (made with soy milk and seasoned with a touch of fennel and cinnamon). She sells more of the traditional buttermilk pancakes, but my favorite here are the buttery, crepelike Swedish-style cakes, which are folded around a filling of red lingonberries. If size matters to you, Barden makes ’em big, too. There’s a platter-sized number that requires a cookie sheet to flip. She’s a taskmaster when it comes to her hotcakes, instructing the nearest server to deliver them as soon as they come off the grill. Even the restaurant’s new host — a dead ringer for Peter Tork of the Monkees, that ’60s band that gave us “Tapioca Tundra” and “Apples, Peaches, Bananas and Pears” — has been known to pinch run a plate.

[page]

By the time I finished my meal at Succotash, I was beached on the flapjack tundra. I had set out to find Kansas City’s single most perfect pancake. But after 72 hours of griddle gorging, I could see that the project was bigger than my appetite, waistline and sanity could handle on deadline. (I now need a sabbatical from pancakes so I can reintroduce the rest of the food groups — spicy, crunchy, greasy, meaty, healthy — to my diet.) So this list isn’t definitive and is open to suggestions from Pitch readers, who I’m sure have their own candidates for the finest pancake in the metro.

And while you readers are working on that challenge, here’s another one for restaurant owners: How about some real maple syrup on your tables? After all the corn syrup I swallowed, I’d settle for a modest corkage fee if I could bring my own flask of the real thing.