What: The Banana Walnut Pancakes
Where: The Palms Café, 69930 Highway 111, Rancho Mirage; also at 44150 Town Center Way, Palm Desert
How much: $9.75; also available as an add-on with other entrées
Contact: 760-770-1614 (Rancho Mirage), 760-779-1617 (Palm Desert); thepalmscaferm.com
Why: Big chunks of banana.
I like pancakes—but I rarely order them for breakfast.
Here’s why: When it comes to a choice between pork (sausage … bacon … mmm!) and what’s basically bread covered with some sort of sweet sauce, I am going to go with the pork 99.43 percent of the time. Because, y’know, pork.
However, the banana walnut pancakes at the Palms Café in Rancho Mirage came highly recommended, so I ordered one. Boy, am I glad I did.
(OK, confession time: I got bacon and eggs, too. No judgment, please.)
The buttermilk pancake (a wheat variety made with Splenda is also available) part of the not-too-sweet pancake was tasty in and of itself; the menu touts the fact it’s made with real buttermilk (the words are even underlined), and you can indeed taste that buttermilk. However, the addition of big slices of banana, and just enough walnut pieces, took these pancakes from tasty to oooh I think I’d like another.
However, all was not perfect in Pancake Land: The Palms Café gets a slap on the wrist for apparently not offering customers real maple syrup. The pancake, as you can see, came with a little plastic container of syrup that, unless my taste buds (and those of my father in law, who was dining with me) were deeply confused, was not real maple syrup; instead, it was apparently one of those corn-syrup atrocities that’s foisted on unwitting Americans way too frequently. According to my server, Smucker’s Sugar Free Breakfast Syrup was the only other available alternative, which was a shame; I’d gladly have paid an extra buck or two for the real deal.
No worries; the next time I head to the Palms Café for one of these heavenly breakfast pancakes, I’ll skip the bacon and eggs—and I’ll bring my own syrup.