Pancake Diner Burleigh — Restaurant in Gold Coast City

"Still better than Mc Donald's & Hungry Jacks" !

Okay, so there are a few moving parts to this review given the overall experience was a 3-star rating.

This place has a lot of potential, and could be right up there with some of the best diners & burger bars around Brisbane.

With some small tweaks to food preparation and their condiments, this quite easily could be a 5-star dining experience

This 70's Retro American styled dining may not resonate with the Gen Z, or the alpha generation. So, the question must be, how are you going to stay relevant amongst the varied burger and pancake outlets around Brisbane.

Factoring also, that over the last few years the pancake Diner has gone from a standard Cheeseburger costing approximately $13 to now being a minimum of $20.

So, whilst food is the No1 component of any fast-food chain, you are also buying into the Nostalgia of their classic American styled 70’s diner.

The Food - My view's Only

The BBQ bacon Cheeseburger deluxe - Soft fresh buns and the lettuce and tomato were also nice and fresh & didn't taste like they had been in a walk-in fridge for a week.

The combination should work, and for the most part still tasted okay when you ate it together.

Sadly however, the meat patty was Overcooked, this drawing out most of the fat and juices from ground beef, resulting in a much dryer, and far less tasty patty.

The burger was also drowned in sauce, and whilst I was reassured by my bestie that this is standard with any American themed burger. I can assure you it needs to be dialed back to 1/2 that amount when one of the key ingredients was the addition of a runny sunny side up egg .

Thank God the paper serviettes were free as one bite and you’ve deconstructed the burger and now find yourself eating like you’re a carton of coldies deep at a family BBQ, licking the sauce as it runs down your pinkie finger to your palm, and sucking the egg from your fingertip’s “yikes”.

The fries were also a little hit and miss around the table, some appearing as though they had been double dipped, being bright yellow in color and quite firm to chew, this perhaps due to using old oil?

The service was very good, and we found the front of house crew to be friendly & engaged as far as taking our orders, also bringing our food to the table.

There were also some little bug bearers with the condiments that I felt let the theme of this restaurant down.

Examples:

Old Heinz sauce bottles being refilled, when you would expect to see traditional squeeze bottles without branding or dates. The sauce also tasted like fountain tomato sauce but was expecting Hunts tomato sauce.

The old plastic supermarket salt and pepper grinders were also passed their use by date and would have been a better touch to go back to what diners were using and still use today. Eiffel tower Olympia styled salt and pepper shakers would have added to the theatrics.

Dare I say it, but whilst the red chequered paper looks good on your plate, it is just not practical when eating your meal.

The burgers would have been much more appealing if they were half wrapped, this also allowing you to execute a one hander & eat the burger, also keep it together at the same time.

All round it was a good little experience, and with a small investment to utensils, and training behind the line, this place could...

Was excited to come here for my mums 70th Bday & oh how I wish we didn't! If i could leave no stars I would. Firstly, we couldn't book ahead for a table as they will only except bookings over 8 people (we had 7!). We went on a Sunday night the resturant wasn't busy at all. Waited at the sign to be seated but was ignored but staff for roughly 5-10mins when someone finally came over we were told to "seat where you won't" went to sit down then was told that we couldn't seat at the table we chose 🤦🏻‍♀️ when we were finally seated one of our party started to get dripped on by the above A/C vent. Menu is very busy with lots of options. All of our table ordered pancakes & milkshakes but we had to wait 20-25mins for our order to be taken as all the staff kept ignoring us & didn't seem to even want to do their job, we ended up having to flag down someone in the end. After ordering we waited 45mins for our food, one member on our table ordered gluten free pancakes which arrived after everyone on the table had finished eating! Overall, the food was tasty with huge portions, pancakes were fluffy and the gluten free pancakes were really good. But at no point did anyone come over to see how our meals where or explain why the last meal was taking so long we had to constantly ask staff what was going on with vague responses. Our drinks never arrived, we had to yet again follow this up. When we finally received our drinks we were almost ready to leave and the drinks were so bad most of our table couldn't even drink them! I'm still wondering how you stuff up a milkshake!!! When we left no apology was given for the beyond disappointing service WE had to ask for a discount on our bill that was sooo over priced that we felt so robbed and dissatisfied with the whole experience. Manager didn't seem interested in hearing any of our concerns & she seemed like she didn't even know what she was doing or how to make up for the bad experience, staff were unorganized & quite frankly seemed like they just didn't want to be there. Would hate to go here when it's actually busy, good luck getting any kind of decent service from this place. Unfortunately don't think it will last long. Will not be going back anytime soon which is a shame as good gluten free pancakes are hard to find but couldn't put ourselves through the service experience side of...

Got the macadamia pancakes, excited to try out this new spot, and was hugely disappointed. We usually have pancakes at home on sundays but thought we might give this place a go. Pancakes dry, full of air and super bland in flavour. Don’t even get me started on the “golden syrup” or whatever special watered down recipe they have in the self serve bottles at the table. We had 4 of us and we just kept squirting and squirting this thing looking at each other in confusion because no matter how much you use, there’s just such minimal flavour and thickness. It just… disappears…. and then you squirt more… and it’s like you never added anything… Any other time you use golden syrup or maple syrup EVER in history, it’s a couple little squirts and then often it’s TOO much flavour / too sweet. 😂 I dunno what sorta special recipe this syrup is but i’ve never been more confused holding a bottle of golden / maple syrup in my life. Looking at it in confusion asking the bottle itself, what even ARE you!? I guess we’ll never know, but one thing I do know for sure is we’ll stick to our home made pancakes for now. Or next time we’re feeling lazy, just opt for maccas pancakes cause even they are 4-5x better. It sucks to say, cause i seen this place for years at Coolangatta and was always super keen to give it a try, so unless it’s a completely different menu, i guess i wasn’t missing out on much! To end on a positive note, service was nice for us, fast, polite and overall positive. Environment is awesome, feels like i’ve been pulled back in time for a moment, attention to detail with even the vintage metal speakers was pretty cool. Huge props for fitout. Pancakes were just a huge disappointment, which...