Critic's Review
It's official. The International House of Pancakes has changed their name to International House of Burgers. With dopey millenials forking up $16-18 for ground beef, the switch to burgers was too compelling to resist.
Cheeseburger Fries and a 16oz drink: $6.99.
Of course they sold burgers before, so this is just a "temporary" PR stunt.
Review 12/3/14
I wasn't going out to eat today, but as I was driving home I decided to stop into IHOP for a late breakfast. I hadn't been to this location in 4 years; not that I expected much to change.
There's always a couple of people in IHOP or Denny's, no matter what time of day. The place is virtually the same as it was; lots of booths and more diner-like than the past couple of diners I've been to.
They give you a pot of coffee, which avoids the constant topping off of the mini-cup. It's pretty bad coffee, but I have to have coffee with eggs.
I don't recall if they had the syrup setup last time; I'm not a big pancakes guy but you certainly have some choices if you get them here.
I usually don't order omelets, but I noticed a "Chorizo Fiesta Omelet", which seemed interesting. The description on the menu was as follows:
looked pretty good. My server, who did a good job of keeping an eye on me, didn't know which omelet I was referring to. "Oh, the Spicy Omelete". I guess that's what they call it. I ordered it with hash browns, which are really good at IHOP.A spicy chorizo omelette topped with citrus chili sauce, served with a fresh grilled serrano pepper
They play 50s music here; The Drifters and The Tune Weavers with Boogie Woogie Christmas mixed in. When the omelet came out, my heart sank a bit. First of all, it smelled terrible. Before I put a fork to it, I was wondering if I'd be able to eat it at all. Notice in the menu picture the sauce is red; this was brown. Stinky brown.
The hash browns looked just about perfect, so at least I had that. I wouldn't starve.
The sauce was, in fact, awful. But the sausage itself was rather benign; nothing spicy about it but it wasn't bad, and with eggs and cheese an onions I was able to salvage some food.
The Serrano pepper, which was supposed to be "freshly grilled", was raw. I cut it in half to verify it was raw. The rough cut of the sausage was odd; like they tore up a sausage patty and threw it on. A couple of pieces of pepper; if they took some care to make this and left off the sauce, this could have been good.
My fault for ordering something complicated in a place with a minimum wage cook.
Conclusion
Back in the day IHOP was a treat, but it's grown into a tired chain; same story as Denny's. Don't order anything complicated and you'll be fine.
Review 11/19/10
I hadn't been to an iHop in ages. But I figured a lot of people on vacation look for iHops. So there I was.
This place has a strange feel to it; it smells like maple syrup. It was mid afternoon so it was pretty empty. I suppose its not a bad looking place, but the syrup smell irked me a bit.
The menu wasn't as interesting as I'd hoped. I have a policy about not ordering things that don't even look good in the pictures, so my choices were limited. I wasn't all that hungry, and the sausages in the picture looks nice and plump, so I just went with a quickie breakfast. The coffee here is terrible; they do put a pot on the table so you don't have to worry about an empty cup, but after the cubano coffee I had yesterday this was just junk. Finally the food was served.
The sausages were a lot smaller than in the picture. The hash browns were pretty good; much better than the version I had at Ocean's the other day. The food was pretty good over all.
Service, however, was bad. I purposely put my empty creamers and empty sugar packets as the service end of the table; the server never made any attempt to clear the table. Its just basic service to do that. It's iHop, so I guess I just expected too much.