In the news this week it has been reported that the American food chain ‘International House of Pancakes (IHOP) is to be re-branded as ‘International House of Burgers’. It seems that IHOP have tried to toughen-up their image by specialising in the well-know ‘hard-man’ favourite, the beefburger.
Perhaps we should all be quaking in our boots at the prospect of a bunch of former pancake-sellers serving buns packed with meat, fat, salt and other tough-guy ingredients. Maybe they’ll even go for the full-blown hard-nut market and ban lettuce and tomato, instead adding double quantities of mustard and chilli.
One thing is for certain, we won’t be joing IHOP in making drastic changes to our product-line. We won’t be making the switch from pancake wedding catering to knocking-out burgers, BBQ or similar. It’s just not something that interests us. We’re quite happy with our mobile crepe stand, attending weddings, touring the country and meeting people at happy occasions such as weddings and anniversaries. We have no great desire to joing the ever-growing number of street-food wedding caterers who are trying to find a niche or gimmick which hasn’t been done before. We just keep on doing what we’ve been doing for over a decade and we’re happy with that. As IHOP may discover, changing a winning and successful formula isn’t always a wise decision.
One of the reasons it has been suggested that they may have changed direction is that the making of pancakes requires more skill than cooking a burger. From what we have seen, we would agree with that. Wedding guests are always intrigued by the process of making a crepe and sometimes they enjoy that aspect almost as much as the food itself. The other major difference between the two foodstuffs is that one is pretty much standard and regular, with not much variety. Whereas with our extensive menu wedding guests have around 20 flavours from which to choose. Having so much choice can make things difficult for some of the more indecisive guests, but with crêpes, at least they do get to choose – everything from nutella to cheese & onion flavour – i.e the full range of sweet and savoury options.
