What empowers me to make The Original Pancake House the official breakfast restaurant of the Search Engine Optimization industry?  Not a damn thing.  Well, other than I love Dutch Babies and I love SEO.  That’s got to carry some type of authority, right?

Here is a quick little blurb about The Original Pancake House (aka OPH) and why it should be considered the breakfast restaurant of the SEO industry.

1. They have locations throughout the nation, but not so many that they are in every city.  They stay a special treat by being in most major cities but not all major cities.  Thus, when us SEO folks are going to conferences, visiting clients, or just figuring out a way to justify an IRS write off to an exotic location, they may be blessed with the opportunity of having an OPH in that geography.
2. They are HQ’d in Portland, OR, and I was born in Portland, OR.
3. They are highly rated from all sorts of places, but I am too damn lazy to go look up all of the awards and link to them (besides, now some commenter will do it for me).

Now, I have been visiting OPHs since I was in junior high school and our bus took us to OPH on our 8th grade field trip to Astoria, OR (we drove through Portland, OR, learning about Lewis & Clark). I have hit over 20 locations, and I order the exact same thing every time.

This is what I order and what I highly recommend all SEOs order as well:

• Dutch Baby with blueberry compote, powdered sugar, butter, and maple syrup
• A side of thick sliced bacon (don’t specify how you want it cooked, they’ll cook it perfectly)
• A cup of hot chocolate with whipped cream (I was raised a Mormon from age 13 to 21, so I never learned to like coffee, even though I haven’t seen the inside of a church in 10 years)
• A large water (the sugary foods make you really, really thirsty)

Now, there are very few differences amongst the locations I have been to, and they are the following:

1. Seating arrangement – California style seating (literally sitting right next to a complete stranger) to traditional café style seating.  The food is best at a California style seating arrangement, even though logic doesn’t really follow to that association.
2. Whether or not they also serve lunch – If they also serve lunch, the food will taste a little bit like a hamburger for some reason (even if it is early in the morning).  The worst example of this is the North Seattle OPH, which I tried on more than one occasion to give them another shot, but it only made things worse.
3. The bacon – Either it will be the best you ever had or it will taste like someone scraped it off of the kitchen floor.  There is no middle ground and 90% of the time, it will be the best bacon you have ever had (even if you just went to OPH last week).
4. The whipped cream – so far I have only found the ‘real whipped cream’ at the Aliso Viejo, CA location (I used to take the Buy.com guys out to breakfast there all the time; company-paid OPH—what’s better?).  All other locations use the spray can whipped cream, which is fine but nothing like Aliso Viejo’s whip real whipped cream.
5. Mini-chocolate chips on top of your hot chocolate – this tends to be a south of the Mason-Dixon thing and almost 100% in Texas.  Not sure why, but it’s a cool treat to get little mini-chocolate chips on your hot chocolate.
6. Whether or not they offer free refills on the hot chocolate, and if so, how many?  It’s becoming really rare to get the free refill anymore.
7. The rip-off OPHs (like the one in Yorba Linda, CA) don’t serve the oven-baked Dutch Baby.  That is just wrong and all new franchisees have to have the oven baked option, so it will be really rare to find an OPH that uses a skillet versus an oven to make their Dutch Babies.  The owner in Yorba Linda, though, is always there on Saturdays and Sundays and is one of the nicest people I know.  Get the buttermilk pancakes there and enjoy the free refills on hot chocolate, but skip the Dutch Baby at that location only.

If you haven’t taken the chance to check out the OPHs across the world, do so and feel free to write your comments here.  This can become the official thread in the SEO industry about the official SEO breakfast restaurant.

NOTE: This is one hell of an example about quality content (the food and service) creating a viral marketing buzz (if others go and this becomes a popular thread).  When you hear SEOs get on their pulpit about quality content, it is for a reason.  It creates passion, and passion drives more business for you, whether via a website or into the official SEO breakfast restaurant.  ;-)

Brent D. Payne

SEO Manager and Breakfast Aficionado