IHOP — Restaurant in Boulder

This review is a month or two late, that is how long it took me to process my 'experience':

The IHOP stands alone on the bleak suburban landscape, a fluorescent beacon of hollow promises. I entered with a heart not filled with hope but with resignation, as if stepping into a Sisyphean nightmare where the gods themselves mocked humanity's unquenchable hunger.

The waitress, her eyes dimmed by years of corporate servitude, handed me a laminated menu that reeked not of possibility but of despair. The photographs of pancakes and syrup were not invitations to joy but spectral images of an unattainable ideal. I ordered coffee, black as the void, and an omelette, though I knew no sustenance awaited me here.

The coffee arrived lukewarm, its flavor reminiscent of rainwater collected from a rusting gutter. The omelette followed, a grotesque parody of nourishment. Its rubbery texture hinted at an unholy process—perhaps a pact with some infernal machine designed to strip food of all vitality. Even the diced ham within seemed to mourn its imprisonment, tiny cubes of meat that spoke of lives unfulfilled.

Around me, families sat in uneasy silence, their faces lit by the cold blue glow of their phones. Children wailed, their cries absorbed by the sticky vinyl seats, as if the restaurant itself fed on their discontent. The air smelled faintly of burnt batter and industrial cleaning agents, a reminder that entropy reigns supreme, even in the realm of breakfast.

At last, I requested the check. The price, though modest, seemed a cruel joke—a monetary exchange not for food but for the experience of existential dread. I left the IHOP not satiated, but hollowed out, a wanderer in a desolate world where even pancakes cannot redeem the...

Don't eat here. I used to work here and I'll never eat at an IHOP again, especially this one. I have many complaints about this place but one of the most concerning is the cleanliness of the kitchen and food areas. I have worked at restaurants before and IHOP barely cleans at all compared to where I've worked before. They smoke in the office with the door open which is right next to the kitchen and dry storage. Dry storage smells very musty and smoky and I'm sure is filled with mold. They cheat on health inspections and for the majority of my time there they used the same temperature sheets instead of checking to make sure all the food was kept at the correct temp. I took it upon myself one day to take apart the soda machine and clean the inside. What I found was TONS of black mold. I had been the only one to clean in in months. They had been serving people soda from a moldy soda machine for MONTHS. Most other restaurants clean their soda machine's daily. Also they NEVER wash the coffee pots that sit on the table. Everyday all they do is dump out the coffee in the pot and rinse it with water. I actually wanted to put them in the dishwasher but I was told for whatever reason that I wasn't allowed to do that. On top of the quality of the food and many health concerns; the staff there is unprofessional and rude. Don't be surprised if you hear yelling and screaming and employees fighting throughout your meal. If you're looking for some breakfast or somewhere open 24/7 Denny's is located 30th and Baseline. Go there instead. Boulder has many other great breakfast places; no reason to make yourself sick...

TL;DR - the food was bad and pricing was intentionally incredibly misleading and straight up wrong. Never going again.

The food was sub par, my eggs came soaked in cheap cooking oil and over done, hash browns hardly cooked all the way through. The only thing they got right was the 'short stack' of pancakes, I guess it's in the name.

What really upset me was the pricing, the server showed us a 'promotional menu' of pancake dishes that came with breakfast food (eggs/hashbrowns etc.). The menu, apparently, listed prices for 'adding' the breakfast food on to the pancakes but not the actual price of the pancakes.This was not at all clear (no '+' sign on the menu, no visible price for the pancakes, no text saying that the prices were in addition to some mystery pancake price, just listed prices next to each breakfast food set). When ordering, the server made it seem like the prices listed on the menu were for the pancakes and hashbrowns/eggs/bacon that we ordered.

We also had to REQUEST an itemized receipt from the server, who didn't just give us our receipt! Upon inspection of the menu after getting the check, we couldn't find the price of the pancakes anywhere!

Furthermore, when ordering drinks (I ordered a hot chocolate), the server scurried off and brought out the most expensive version of the drink, rather than letting me state which size I wanted. The server also asked if I wanted 'more' hot chocolate (rather than 'another' hot chocolate) and I hate to confirm that 'more' hot chocolate would...