The Order: The Big Pancake at Middle Child Clubhouse

Welcome to the weekend!

Today we’re digging into one of our all-time favorite breakfast dishes: the Big Pancake at Middle Child Clubhouse in Philadelphia. Readers of this newsletter know how much we enjoy Philly’s food scene, and Middle Child Clubhouse is a non-negotiable stop on our trips. For today’s edition of The Order, Amy talked with Matt Cahn, the restaurant’s owner, about what goes into the dish, what makes it special, and how the team has incorporated the pancake into the menu in other ways.

It would be a terrific idea to pair a visit to Philly with a trip to Brooklyn. So be sure to snag July’s new Field Guide to Brooklyn, New York and then grab the Philly Field Guide too. Both guides are included in a paid subscription, and they offer dining and drinking itineraries featuring our picks for coffee, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and drinks.

Reminder! Today is the last day to enter our three-year anniversary giveaway with American Spoon. All paid subscribers are entered to win a box of our favorite American Spoon products — you can find more details here. If you haven’t already, upgrade today!

And before we log off for the weekend, we’ll send along our Weekend Reading list, which includes a guide to the South’s best towns for music (plus where to eat and drink), an exploration of the Midwest’s favorite broasted chicken, and a guide to Columbus, Ohio happy hours.

Thanks for reading!

— Amy Cavanaugh & Kenney Marlatt
Editors, American Weekender

PHILADELPHIA, PA. — The Big Pancake is one of those dishes that you notice from across the room. Several inches thick, it’s served in a pool of orange syrup and crowned with a large pat of butter that grins up at you. If you see one, you want one. “We serve 600 to 700 a week,” says Matt Cahn, owner of the Philadelphia restaurant. “If not more than that.”

It’s a dish that captures the Middle Child ethos. “We’re very diner-inspired and are very nostalgic,” Cahn says. “So we wanted to have pancakes on the menu.” The Big Pancake debuted in June 2023, two years after the restaurant opened in Fishtown. The first Middle Child outpost, in Center City, has a smaller footprint and serves breakfast and lunch sandwiches. “We’re sandwich focused because the shop is so small,” Cahn explains. “Clubhouse is a bigger location with a five-foot griddle. So over the years, we’ve expanded the menu and added more things that felt on brand, whether that’s diner or Jewish deli food or whatever.”

Pancakes were an obvious fit, so the team went on a pancake tour to find inspiration. “We were trying pancakes at different diners and we were out in New York and went to Sunday in Brooklyn, which has a super-thick cornmeal pancake, like a skillet corn cake,” Cahn says. The pancake researchers loved it, and realized that the thicker approach was the right direction: “We were like, ‘All right, so we’re just kind of emulating the idea of getting a triple stack of pancakes but getting it done in one.’”

“We’re just kind of emulating the idea of getting a triple stack of pancakes but getting it done in one.’” — Matt Cahn, Middle Child Clubhouse

The key attribute of the Big Pancake is its lightness. Achieving that fluffy texture was a process, and Cahn and the team created a batter with multiple flours and leavening agents. They use a sifted red wheat flour from Lost Bread Co., a local baker and miller just a two-minute walk from the restaurant. “Everything they do is milled in-house and they’re using all Pennsylvania grains,” Cahn says. “We get that really nice wheaty flavor from that and then AP flour balances it out so that we still get a lot of rise.” They add baking powder, baking soda, and buttermilk, and then mix it gently. They let the batter rest and hydrate but make sure it doesn’t over-hydrate so it still gets a good rise. “Once we were able to get a good fluffy pancake, then we were like, ‘All right, what do we want to put on it?’”

Edwin De La Rosa was the restaurant’s executive chef at the time of the pancake’s creation, and he tapped his Dominican roots for inspiration. “We’re very American inspired, but having a pancake with American flour in it was enough,” Cahn says. “It didn’t need to be so classic. We wanted something a little bit different.” De La Rosa recalled a tea made with lemon and orange peels and honey that his mother made for him when he was sick as a child. That citrusy flavor profile, mixed with honey and butter to make a syrup, pops against the pancake. The signature whipped butter pat is made using a 3D printed mold. “We just thought it was really cute,” Cahn says. “It’s got a little bit of that Goldfish thing — the snack that smiles back.” The finishing touches are orange zest and flaky Maldon salt. The result is something that is fully Middle Child: “It has this classic American thing going on. It has this hyper local thing going on. And then there’s the Dominican childhood influence from Edwin.”

The pancake can serve a single diner for breakfast, but it’s also ideal to order one to share for the table, since there are so many other great morning dishes. We love the classic breakfast sandwich, with a thick stack of scrambled eggs, Cooper Sharp (the American cheese that a lot of Philly chefs are using for their cheesesteaks these days), and arugula on potato bread. We add slices of pork roll, the bologna-like breakfast meat that’s big in New Jersey and the surrounding area. We also get the latke’d hash browns with dill cream and the frozen coffee, which is spiced and made with coconut milk. The breakfast menu is served until 2, and you can also get the sandwich-focused lunch menu until then (don’t miss their best-known sandwich, the Shopsin Club, which features turkey, cranberry miso mayo, sweet pickles, bacon, avocado, and bibb lettuce on ciabatta).

Though the kitchen is closed from 2 to 5 p.m., it’s open for drinks during this window. We know Beverage Director and GM Brandon Lee Thrash from his time in Chicago, and always like to pop in to see what he and the team are doing on the beverage front. One of the program’s signatures (and one of my favorites), is the Seawater Margarita, which is made with tequila, grapefruit, lime, and celery and gets a burst of savory salinity from kombu. The dark and stirred MidKid Vieux Carre, with whiskey, brandy, amaro, and Benedictine, is another go-to.

Dinner is great, too — the menu features the same approach as breakfast, with nostalgic and updated takes on American classics. We recommend starting with the broiled oysters with scampi butter and basil, the Clubhouse Caesar salad with garlic croutons, and the dinner latkes, which are accented with unagi sauce, Kewpie mayo, pickled ginger, and scallions for an okonomiyaki-inspired bite. We quite like the cheeseburger, dressed with American, pickles, onions, and cherry pepper mayo, but for something larger, there’s also Averna-glazed ribs and chicken Milanese with cornichon vinaigrette.

For dessert, there is a solid Key lime pie with a Ritz cracker crust, whipped cream, and shower of lime zest, but there is also another pancake. “As a restaurant, we’re trying to be efficient and cross-utilize as much as possible,” Cahn explains. “So we’ve got a couple of items we serve during the day that we serve a different version of at night.” While you can only get the Big Pancake during daytime hours, at night you can have it for dessert. Olivia’s Pancake à la mode is smaller and cooked in a cast iron skillet with clarified butter, then turned it into a sundae with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, a drizzle of the citrus honey butter syrup, and a garnish of candied pecans and flaky salt.

But the team hasn’t stopped there — new to the breakfast menu is the MidGriddle, a riff on the McGriddle, made with two three-inch pancakes. Between those, they tuck a sous-vide egg patty, local sausage spiced with fennel and coriander, and cheddar. “Then it gets a spicy maple syrup that is like a breakfast buffalo sauce,” Cahn says. “It’s maple syrup, butter, and sriracha. Very simple, very approachable, but it just hits. It’s one of those things that doesn’t need a lot more.”

If something simpler calls to you, know that there is yet one more way to try the pancake. “I think some people just really want classic maple syrup on their pancakes, which we were always kind of adamantly against,” Cahn says. “And then I was like, all right, let me get off my high horse and give people what they want.” What they want is local maple syrup from upstate Pennsylvania. But there is, of course, a Middle Child touch: a sprinkle of dehydrated maple syrup, a pinch of salt and a special powdered sugar that doesn’t hydrate quickly. Cahn says: “It’s nice when it hits the maple syrup, it doesn’t disappear right away.”

As soon as you pick up your fork though, that pancake surely will.

1232 N Front St, Philadelphia, PA | @middlechildclubhouse

All our Brooklyn favorites are available as a three-day Field Guide that you can download on our website. As always, it’s free for paid subscribers — just use the discount code found in this month’s Weekend Getaway newsletter at checkout. Here’s what you get:

• Three-day recommended dining itinerary

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Reminder: As a paid subscriber, you can use this month’s code to download any other Field Guide you’d like for free! We recommend saving your Field Guides to Apple Books or Dropbox for the best experience on an iPhone. Google Drive works great too on other smartphones.

Paid subscribers also get access to the American Weekender Google Map. This map includes every place we’ve ever mentioned in our newsletters plus every place we’ve ever recommended in our Field Guides. Whether you’re looking for roadside barbecue in Tennessee, afternoon cocktails in New Orleans, or a farm-to-table dinner in Western Michigan, our map — which has more than 1,350 locations! — will point the way. We update it with new spots each week, so keep it bookmarked for your next trip. Paid subscribers can find the map linked in our latest Weekend Getaway newsletter.

THE SOUTH

The South’s Best Music Towns: Where to Find Your Groove: Garden & Gun recently published a feature on the best music towns in the South, and while music was the focus, the piece is also packed with great food intel, too. The towns featured include St. Augustine, Florida; Clarksdale, Mississippi; and Asheville, North Carolina, where writer Mary Catherine McAnnally Scott recommends AW-approved spots like cocktail bar Little Jumbo and Burial Beer. (Garden & Gun)

WISCONSIN

The Finest-Eatin’ Chicken in the World: Robert Simonson digs into broasted chicken, which, if you’ve never heard of it, probably means you aren’t from the Midwest. The dish is cooked in a specific pressure fryer sold by the Broaster Company out of Beloit, Wisconsin, and you’ll see broasted chicken on the menu at supper clubs, gas stations, and elsewhere in the region. Simonson writes: “Broasted chicken, because of the pressure cooker aspect, takes 10 1/2 minutes. The process keeps the meat inside juicy and moist, while rendering the skin golden, crispy and flaky. As a lifelong consumer of broasted chicken, I can testify as to the consistency of the product, as well as its unique deliciousness. The textural contrast between the meat and the skin is quite remarkable.” (The Mix with Robert Simonson)

OHIO

Columbus Happy Hours for Foodies, Recommended by Foodies: We have been seeing an increase in happy hour food deals around the country lately, and for the Columbus Foodletter, Bethia Woolf tapped 20 happy hour recommendations from local writers and others in the know. It’s a helpful guide for your next Columbus trip. I’ll be adding food photographer Jordan Posner’s pick for The Top Steak House, which opened in 1955, to my list: “Social Hour at The Top Steak House in Bexley is such a treat—a small menu, but everything is made from scratch. My favorites are the crab dip and the prime rib sliders, made with in-house chips and cold-sliced prime rib. There are drink discounts, too, but I’m here for the food.” (Columbus Foodletter)

— Compiled by Amy Cavanaugh

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