Preposterous Portions of Pancakes

Not long ago, mammoth blood was found preserved in a frozen carcass. This gets exciting, as visions of cloning these long-extinct beings prances through every John Hammond-wannabe's head. But if we could clone and grow our own woolly mammoth, what would you feed it?

You feed it the pancake feast at RJ Riches, that's what.

My loyal readers have seen my accounts of Ducky's housewarming party, and hopefully they will also have had a chance to visit Frank at Kinked Slinky to read his take on Saturday night. We both promised our joint telling of breakfast the next day. So be sure to read his post today after reading mine, because we're both two grown men of our word, and it takes two to tackle just writing about the pancakes we got. Hell, it would prove to take two just to eat one of them...

For two people who can no longer sleep in past 7:00 AM, even on the weekends, the morning after a party is fraught with tip-toes and hushed voices. Someone was asleep in every room, shoes piled haphazardly around the doors and patio. It didn't take too long for Frank and I to decide that if we kept waiting for Ducky to get up, our growling stomachs would wake everyone else up and hasten the households' oncoming hangovers.

Frank and I cleaned up the yard a bit, collected our belongings, and soon I was following him from Roseville to Riches. Frank was confident that we take Highway 10. Naturally he took County Road 10 instead, and we had to double-back through church traffic before we found the end of our pancake pilgrimage.

Frank: Walk into RJ Riches and you feel minutely as if you’re in the opening scene of “Reservoir Dogs.” Surrounded by scenery as dirty as the men involved, Eliot and I started our recovery from a … shall we say, inelegant night of partying (at least on my part) at this veteran New Brighton diner. The gem was the taste of breakfast, and two large men got killed by a gigantic pancake.

The family-owned restaurant was 1970's answer to the 1950's all-stainless steel breakfast diners like Denny's. Wood-grain laminate accents and decades-old glass lamp covers - none of which matching in color with the others - met us. The people working there could all have been family indeed, from the hot 20-something chick working the register; our hostess, the lone blonde, who might have been the adopted cousin; and the perpetually grumpy (but hospitable enough) portly aunt who served us. In the kitchen, visible through an old-fashioned brick pass-through, the type found in a pizza place, the father and the uncle of this family worked the grills.

Frank had foretold epic prophecy about RJ Riches' pancakes. “The size of your plate” he said, and a glance at the table next to us confirmed. The menus might as well have been 3 blank pages and a section titled “Pancakes”. The only option we had to consider was if we wanted the Pancake Feast, a cake, choice of meat, and eggs; or Rich's Challenge, which is all the above and a healthy serving of your choice in potatoes. I figured that I didn't need any extraneous carbs getting in the way of my cake, so I ordered the blueberry pancake, bacon (what else?!) and eggs, over-easy, which of course were destined to break yolk into my pancake.

Frank: For the first time in my life, I sucked down a whole pot of coffee. It tasted like the contents of a rain gutter, but you don’t aim for a Wolfgang Puck face at a family restaurant. I pooh-poohed the bacon for a slice of ham. The "premium" pancake blends cost a little over a buck extra, but if you've ever seen me pass up a chocolate-chip pancake ... you haven't, because it's never happened. I would have paid the tip of my pinky for chocolate chips on my pancake.

Somewhere between my third and fourth cup of coffee, the plates arrived. The ham and eggs looked like everyone else’s ham and eggs, but the pancakes … well, look at them.

It didn't take long for our food to arrive, and though I had already spied our neighbor's pancake, nothing had prepared me for the one destined for my mouth. The breakfast was served on two plates: a smaller plate for the meat and eggs, and a large dinner plate dwarfed beneath this huge pancake. If Bob - “His name is Robert Paulson” - had taken his shirt off for Fight Club, I could imagine seeing two of these pancakes as nipples on his bitch tits, “the way you think of God's as big.” The edges of the pancake nearly drooped over the edge of the plate to touch the table top. The crust was an even golden brown, and the cake was thick yet fluffy. When I make pancakes, I'm lucky if one out of 3 of them turn out as well, and mine are hardly poured larger than a DVD. This behemoth before me was perfection.

Before we dug in, we made good on our pre-breakfast deal of flavor-swapping. I took my butter knife and tried to assess the best way to attack this task. Carving out a chunk to share was like trying to dissect a blue whale with an X-acto knife. If we had a real estate agent present when we swapped the large tracts of our pancake territories, we surely would have needed to pay closing costs.

The first bite I took was of the chocolate chip, sans syrup. And let me tell you, it couldn't have tasted any better if served to me in a picnic on the fields of Elysium. I made short work of the chocolate chip, and finally turned to a piece of bacon. Yes, the cake was so good that I gave it priority over bacon.

At this point, both Frank and I were able to start forming words again, and we started discussing the ideas you'll find in these words here. It was interesting to hear that while I was chewing in reverent silence, brainstorming just the words I'd say about these enormous cakes, Frank admitted he did the same thing. In fact, he said it was nice to not have to worry about keeping up conversation.

Now, to my blueberry. I carefully cradled the two over-easy eggs and placed them on the two-thirds left of my cake. They looked comically inadequate, and once broken, the yolk barely lubricated the fluffy cake. I supplemented it with some maple syrup and started in: the blueberries were warm, unbroken, and juicy, meaning the cake had been stirred with care. A few bites of egg-soaked cake, the rest of the bacon, and I chased it all with the remainder of my orange juice (with sufficient pulp to prove that it was either home-squeezed.. or at least it was the expensive store-bought kind that mimics home-squeezed). My hunger was satiated, tummy straining at its limits, and as I sat back in the booth and relaxed, I realized that a full half of my monster cake remained.

I looked up at Frank, who hadn't made it even as far as I. “The wife will appreciate this, at least” he stated as we asked for our to-go boxes.

Frank: Yeah, I had eaten a pathetic portion of my pancake. The balance was cut into sections, like a damn dinner table, and stacked on top of each other in a styrofoam container. It took my until Wednesday to finish it. Just know that entire pizzas came and went at our house during this pancake's lifetime. This pancake lasted longer than Petoria ... I think.

With each of our bills under $15, both Frank and I came to the conclusion that RJ Riches was a step above your commercial “family-styled” restaurants. Whether all the employees there were truly related or not, I never got to ask. It matters little, though, with pancakes that weighed more than the wood-carved box Grandma kept the recipes in, a Thanksgiving dinner atmosphere, and reasonable prices, RJ Riches earned our future return.