Once there was a Pancake House

'm not one to stand in the way of development. As Baguio City progresses from  sleepy town to bustling metropolis, or--to quote the iconic San Francisco radio host Howard Stern describing his own town "a city that never sleeps"--there will be a lot of business turnovers. I get it.  In fact, walking down a street I've lost count how many times I've said, "oh I used to buy toys from this little corner store as a kid..." but  now there's an ATM machine sitting there.  I have to remind myself that modern kids don't really play with "toys" anymore. They play games on the computer--and not with a friendly neighborhood pal anymore either, but with some joystick-rattling nemesis on the other side of the globe. 

The fireplace was lit only on really cold evenings,
usually around the Christmas holiday season, but
just being there brought warmth to the eye. Santa
Claus had never been known to climb down out of it.

   Time moves one, we grow old--what are you going to do about it?

   So one of my favorite sad pastimes these days is just trolling around the 'hood, taking stock of what has changed and what hasn't. Some changes I happily welcome--like the closure of an unappealing and totally out-of-place funeral home that opened along the road I pass by going home each day--now it's gone. The dearly-departed business establishment failed to endear itself to any newly emerging market on casket exhibits just a stone's throw away from where you live. 

   But there a few other changes I achingly regret. One of them is the demise of the short-lived Pancake House that used to occupy the second floor of a small auxilliary building in that BGH Petron compound just across the hospital. I don't think it lasted five years. But in that short time I had come to enjoy chilling in one of its many al fresco dining tables out on its wraparound verandah overlooking the service station.  It sat beside the two-lane traffic flyover that allows cars coming into the city to bypass a traffic bottleneck underneath as vehicles of all shapes and sizes dash in and out of the Petron station to get their fill. 

While sipping your coffee, you could gawk at the 
beehive of activity in the service station down below.
Shades of Flo's Gas Station in that Walt Disney
cartoon movie CARS.

   Entree-wise the menu is not that diverse. After all, one can only think of so many imaginative ways to serve the same staple item—pancake. The coffee is barista-grade but not too different from what you could get from Starbucks or Seattle’s Best. They served “all-day breakfast” that sometimes competed with their popular meals--roast beef plate was my favorite.

   Inside, dining was cozy around a well-appointed wood-burning furnace (here we call it “fireplace”); Floor-to-ceiling glass panel walls made for a very well-lit place that could accommodate a dozen four-seater table arrangements. The furnitures were made of select Philippine hardwoods, their old-town rusticity contrasting with a gallery of post-modern posters featuring Marvel comic superheroes--Batman and company--crowding every other square inch of wall space that is not glass. 

If you can't spare the few more minutes for a more
relaxed pace of coffee-sipping, you can still get a 
quick caffein fix from a 3-in-1 sachet at the Treats
convenience store just below.

     For me the sweet  spot was a table just east of the main door where,  as you sip your coffee, you could see cars slaking their own thirst for gasoline just below. Shades of Flo's Gas Station from the Walt Disney cartoon movie Cars. 

    A gas station for a tourist sight? I don’t think that was all the intention. But on many occasions before setting off on a long drive out of the city, I found that stopping by Pancake House for a brief caffeine respite goes a long way in keeping you alert at the steering wheel once you hit the Tarlac-Pangasinan-La Union Expressway (TPLEX) an hour away. But if you’re in a bigger hurry and cannot spare the few more steps up a spiral staircase leading to the second-floor restaurant, you can still get the same caffeine kick from a 3-in-1 sachet at the Treats convenient store just below it.

   That wraparound verandah was a joy to hang around in. Someone went through a lot of trouble hauling serious pottery up that spiral staircase to have potted flowers lining the verandah's handrails,  exploding in a myriad of colors most days of the summer flowering season.  When the last bloom wilted away,  the loud floral ensemble gave way to the more muted concert of perpetual cacti. Many of the cafe's habitues I noticed were serious cactus collectors and sitting around that verandah spoiled them with endless conversation pieces.

Instead of a cornerpost glob of round concrete, why
not a Ming Dynasty knockoff urn? This one sits on
top of the railing cornerpost of the verandah, with
cars going around the BGH roundabout creating a
surreal backdrop.

  I don't know  why they closed down Pancake House-BGH; I just accepted it as part of that inevitable cycle of change that every growing city goes through. Just another page of local history being written faster than you can read it, an allegory to how the city is changing right before your very eyes.

    But to answer the question, was the change worth it? I suppose it depends on your outlook of what really matters more.  After shuttering down the restaurant, they tore down the building and put up an additional gas pump "island" featuring six more high-speed gasoline pumps. In the eyes of commerce at least, it seems slaking the automotive thirst for dinosaur sauce counts for more than nourishing the hunger in man's stomach, or caressing the yearning for sentimental joy in his heart.

   I’ve written a couple of these articles on my laptop while sipping coffee in that Pancake House—even an ambitious unfinished poem or two still needing more decent rhyming lines to this day. But before I could finish all of  that, insolvency overcame the venue so  now all I have left to tell is just another sad and melancholic   story of how “once there was a Pancake House…"  (all photos copyright 2020 Joel R. Dizon)

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON