The Original Pancake House

The Original Pancake House (Website)

616 W Diversey Pkwy, Chicago, IL 60614

773-929-8130 (Map It)

Hours:

     Daily: 6:30a-3p

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Electrical Outlets:

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WiFi:

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A little food …

Hungry Physicists don’t put much stock in breakfast.  It’s not that we don’t like it, or aren’t hungry, we simply don’t have the time!  Our mornings consist of exams, studying, lab time, console gaming, all of which eat into breakfast time.  At best we make a bowl of cereal, and at worst we grab a pop tart (I’m a huge fan of breakfast consisting of cold pizza and milk).  As demanding as our responsibilities are, we owe it to ourselves to slow down.  To that end, visit The Original Pancake House.

 

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This pancake house is the control against which all other pancake houses should be judged.  On my visit I got a skillet, pancakes, bacon, and endless coffee.  It was all excellent!  If I had a complaint it was that the bacon and skillet were a tad under-salted, but that was easily remedied.  Now that I take a moment to reflect, I wonder if what I liked about this place wasn’t that the food was good, but that the food was as good as I wanted it to be.  Food and coffee aren’t the only abundant feature here – there are lots of big tables and plenty of big napkins.  Due to the nature of the place, and the breakfast accouterments on the tables, it’s really not conducive to group study.  This is “You Time”, put the books aside.

A little science …

The Original Pancake House is mostly underground, which seems odd from the outside.  However, inside it is remarkably bright with false sky-lighting covered by various types of colored glass.  At first thought, colored glass seems un-remarkable, but its development marked one of the first intentional uses of nanoclusters.  Nanoclusters are any “molecule” or system containing “small” numbers of atoms (2 to millions).  The important thing is that their electro-chemistry is often different than it would be if there were a lot more of the material.  For example, copper is conductive, but a piece of copper with only 10 atoms might be an insulator.  In any case, colored glass comes from metallic nanocluster impurities that were introduced to the glass during heating.  Their electro-chemical influence causes the glass to transmit different colors!