It’s nine o’clock on an A-road somewhere, and the neon is doing that thing neon does: humming quietly, promising everything. Outside sits a prefab building thirty feet long and eleven feet wide, dropped into the car park of a former cinema in Reading on 17 June 1960 with exactly eleven stools bolted inside. That was the first Little Chef. It served a full English at nine at night and pancakes at seven in the morning, and it did not consider this newsworthy.
The man behind it was Sam Alper, a caravan designer who crossed America in 1958 and spotted a mail-order diner called — conveniently — The Little Chef, in Leedey, Oklahoma. He came home, founded Little Chef Limited on 22 July 1959, and had the first prototype built in a builder’s yard in Tilehurst, which remains the only restaurant in history to have been assembled among the bricks. From those eleven stools the chain grew to a peak of 439 restaurants, then over-expanded, as British institutions do, closed nearly half of itself by 2005, and was entirely gone by the end of October 2018. The trademark survives, registered in Kuwait. Nothing about this story is normal except the food.
Because between the Olympic Breakfast and the Early Starter — a full English and a cooked breakfast, available at all hours, which is the correct position on both — the menu also carried the Jubilee Pancakes: a stack of pancakes with banana, strawberry and cream. A chain that refused to acknowledge the clock deserves a recipe that refuses to acknowledge the clock. So here it is, with thick back bacon laid across the top, because the American diner that inspired the whole thing had the right idea and Britain has always had the better bacon.
Ingredients
- 225g self-raising flour
- 1 tbsp caster sugar
- 2 eggs
- 350ml milk
- 50g butter, melted, plus 25g cold for the pan
- 4 thick rashers of back bacon
- 2 bananas, halved lengthways
- 2 tbsp golden syrup, plus extra to drizzle
- 200g strawberries, hulled and sliced
- Double cream, to serve — Jubilee-style, and non-negotiable if you’re doing this properly
Vegetarian note: leave the bacon off and it’s a Jubilee Pancake, exactly as the menu had it. If you want the salt back without the pig, a handful of salted caramelised hazelnuts goes very well with the banana.
Method
- Sift the flour and sugar into a bowl, make a well, crack in the eggs, pour in most of the milk and whisk to a smooth batter, loosening with the rest. It should coat the back of a spoon and then hesitate — like a driver deciding whether this services will do or whether the next one is worth the fuel.
- Rest the batter for ten minutes while you lay out the plates. Eleven plates would be traditional. Four will do.
- Heat a heavy pan and add a knob of the cold butter. Build one pancake at a time, the way Alper built the first restaurant: in a yard, one unit at a time, long before the expansion got ambitious.
- Cook until the surface bubbles and the edges look finished — about two minutes. Flip, one minute more. Do not flip it theatrically; the eleven stools were bolted down for a reason.
- Stack the finished pancakes on a warm plate, building upwards like the chain in the 1970s: rapidly, confidently, and with slightly more optimism than the structure can strictly support.
- Fry the bacon in a clean pan until crisp at the edges. Thick back bacon is the British position on bacon, and it is the one thing our version does better than the diner in Leedey, Oklahoma that started all of this.
- Melt the remaining butter with the golden syrup in the same pan and caramelise the bananas cut-side down, two or three minutes, until they go the colour of the Little Chef logo chef. This part cannot be rushed. The company that rushed its closure programme ended up trademarked in Kuwait.
- Assemble: pancake stack, bananas, strawberries, bacon draped across the top like a sign you can eat, a spoon of cold cream, and a final drizzle of golden syrup. Carry it to the table at once — this brand has a short window.
Eat at seven in the morning or nine at night; the recipe takes no position on the clock, which was the entire point of the place. The stack keeps for exactly as long as it takes to walk to the table. The brand still exists, registered as a trademark in Kuwait. The pancakes don’t. Get the timing right and you’ll never notice the difference.
