IHOP in Springfield

“Everything was good. All except for they have really uped their prices practically double of what it was a little while back. Granted we don't go there that often, but 2 senior breakfast meals at $27 is just a bit much. Doubt if we go back to any IHOP restaurants to eat again“

“I am not certain what parallel dimension these negative reviews have crawled out of, nor what bleak psychic tundra the detractors inhabit. Perhaps they come from a world where joy has been outlawed, where pancakes are served without hope, and where the soul is fed only on the gray dust of human disappointment.

But here, in this IHOP, on this unassuming evening, I encountered something bordering on the miraculous.

I ordered the coffee-cake pancake combo — two eggs, one bacon, one sausage, hash browns, and an orange juice. A simple meal, yes, but simplicity can reveal the cosmic foundations of existence. The pancakes arrived like warm geological strata, sugared with the kind of sweetness that makes you remember childhood before the first disillusionment. The eggs, pristine, glowed with the quiet resilience of creatures that never lived to see the cruelty of this world.

Kelly and Hailey guided me through the experience like benevolent spirits of the American roadside. Their humanity, their small kindnesses, more than atoned for the Sisyphean atrocities I once endured at the IHOP in Boulder, Colorado — a place I speak of now only in whispers, as one might reference a failed expedition up K2, where many good men were lost.

This IHOP, in contrast, was alive. Hopping, you could say — though that word is too light for what I witnessed. A full theater troupe entered, radiant with the madness of performance, and the staff absorbed their entropy with grace. It was as if, in real time, they were turning the tide of positivity in the universe, defying entropy through the sacred ritual of service during the dinner rush.

Here, in the fluorescent glow and the aroma of frying batter, I found not despair, but a portal — a gentle opening in the fabric of the mundane, reminding me that sometimes, even in the vast indifference of the cosmos, breakfast-for-dinner can be a form of salvation.

Five stars“