As many chain restaurants raise prices, some are adding value meals and special deals to draw consumers in. Enter: IHOP and its entire House Faves menu dedicated to $7 dishes (at some locations, they’re only $6).
Paying that price for a full meal sounds like a great deal any way you cut it, especially since $7 won’t even get you a burger and fries at some fast-food chains right now.
However, if the meal you get for that great price isn’t very good, you’re not actually coming out on top.
Curious to see how good of a value the chain’s value dishes really are, I took my kids to an IHOP in Long Island, New York.
The $7 menu had four options when I visited.
IHOP’s House Faves meals are available Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. During my visit, I found four meals on offer.
The first is the Breakfast Faves combo, which consists of two eggs any way you want them, two strips of bacon or sausage links, and two pancakes.
Next, the French-toast breakfast, which comes with a thick slice of French toast, eggs any way, and your choice of bacon or sausage.
Then, there’s the house scramble, which comes with scrambled eggs with chopped bacon and jack and cheddar cheese, plus hash browns.
Finally, there’s a ham and cheese omelet served with pancakes.
I liked the pancakes in the Breakfast Faves combo, but the eggs let me down.
Simply put, the IHOP pancakes were good. They were fluffy, yet dense (maybe substantial is a better word?) with a rich buttermilk flavor.
I wouldn’t say they’re great — the lump of butter heaped onto their top makes the center too mushy if left to sit too long — but they’re definitely worth ordering.
The bacon was pretty tasty, too. It was crisp in some bits but not dried out and still had that pleasant chewiness in the thicker parts.
However, I wish the sunny-side-up eggs had been cooked longer. They felt watery and didn’t look or taste great.
As my daughter happily chowed down on pancakes, my son, who is quite the foodie, took one look at the spread out before us and decided he’d wait to eat until we got home.
Cautiously optimistic, I carried on.
The house scramble was OK.
IHOP’s house scramble was decent, but it didn’t seem to be cooked consistently throughout. It contained a decent amount of bacon, but some bites were wetter than others.
The hash browns it came with didn’t taste like much of anything to me and were pretty dry — the potato shreds fell apart as soon as I stabbed them with my fork.
I didn’t care for the omelet.
The omelet’s ingredients felt poorly distributed, with too much ham scattered atop it and very little mixed in.
It was slathered in what the IHOP menu calls a “white cheese sauce” that was a bit too gelatinous for my liking. I thought the eggs had a somewhat watery consistency and artificial taste that I didn’t love.
I would not order it again.
The French-toast breakfast was our only true winner.
OK, now for some good news: the French-toast breakfast was tasty and well worth its price — and then some.
The slab of French toast itself was thick and spongy, flavored with cinnamon and syrup, and topped with powdered sugar. It was sweet but not cloyingly so, and it was hefty enough to satisfy even a hungry stomach.
The scrambled eggs served with the French toast were the best eggs of the meals we tried. They seemed cooked evenly and not overdone. Again, the bacon it came with was tasty.
I’d gladly shell out $7 again for the French-toast breakfast and would recommend you do the same.
With better eggs, the Breakfast Faves combo would’ve been fine, so I’d be open to trying it again. There’s also a chance I just got a bad batch of hash browns — so I wouldn’t rule the scramble out, either.
However, I won’t be giving that omelet any second chances.
The post My family tried all the $7 meal deals at IHOP. After some disappointments, we found one was an incredible value. appeared first on Business Insider.
