A few weeks ago, Golden Diner, a restaurant in Manhattan’s Chinatown, began taking reservations for weekend brunch, years after the wait for a table could stretched to two, sometimes three, hours. But the crowds have not diminished. Everyone is willing to stand in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge for the chef Sam Yoo’s pancakes.
Recipe: Golden Diner Pancakes
In 2019, Mr. Yoo opened Golden Diner, where his takes on classic diner dishes weave in playful Asian inflections like a highway zipper merge done right. Diners regularly filled the seats at the counter and small tables along it, and then, in October 2023, someone posted the pancakes on TikTok, then others did as well. The masses arrived, lines outside grew, sales jumped.
What Mr. Yoo thought might be a blip turned into a pivotal moment. “I never created the pancakes to go viral or for the Instagram crowd,” he said. “As a chef, I needed them to be beautiful because you eat with your eyes first, but I wanted to know, ‘Is it balanced? Is it familiar but refreshing in taste and concept?’ ” After researching and testing countless batches of pancakes, he landed on what has become a new classic.
Along with the internet rise of the Golden Diner pancakes came copycat recipes. Mr. Yoo declined to share his version until now.
It’s a game-changing one that combines all the nostalgia of diner pancakes with innovative techniques for a dish that makes your eyes widen at first taste. Mr. Yoo cooks a yeast-risen buttermilk batter in individual skillets to give them height like Japanese soufflé pancakes and a perfect roundness like those in the flapjack emoji. As soon as he stacks them on a plate, he drenches them with buttery maple-honey syrup, then tops them with salted maple-honey butter, both inspired by Korean honey-butter chips and reminiscent of Werther’s hard candies. A berry compote completes the meal with its fresh tang.
To fully experience Golden Diner pancakes is to make — then eat — all four components together. No single step is difficult, but the execution takes some coordination and delivers the high that restaurant cooks get during brunch service. Mr. Yoo said he is still recognized as “Mr. Pancake,” but now spends most of his time in Midtown, where he’s the chef and owner of the new Golden Hof — Korean Bar & Grill. His Golden Diner chef de cuisine, Danny Ugolick, oversees the kitchen downtown, which now revolves around pancake production.
On Saturdays and Sundays, Mr. Ugolick expects about 350 diners for brunch, which means about 280 pancake orders. Each order includes two pancakes, so to turn out about 1,120 pancakes over two days, the cooks prep 60 quarts of berry compote once a week; 60 pounds of maple-honey butter every other day; 35 quarts of maple-honey syrup daily; and 100 quarts of batter twice a day. They can cook only eight pancakes at a time while also making other brunch dishes.
“It’s mainly about time management, risk management,” Mr. Ugolick said, but it’s far simpler at home: Because you’re not cooking hundreds of orders, you can start the batter and, while it rests, make the butter, syrup and berry compote. And since you’re probably cooking with just one skillet, but want to serve everything at once, you finish the pancakes in the oven.
Mr. Yoo doesn’t include any butter in his batter and cooks it in an ungreased nonstick skillet so it develops a dry crust that softens when soaked with the syrup. At the restaurant, the batter is browned on the bottom, then slid under a salamander, a professional broiler, to cook through before the round is flipped. At home, you can brown both sides of a single pancake, then slide it onto a rack-lined pan in the oven so the center cooks through and the outsides stay crackly as you work.
The syrup, which has a savory depth from soy sauce, requires only whisking, as does the butter. The compote is nearly as easy. To retain the berries’ freshness as they thicken, Mr. Yoo cooks them hot and fast with sugar and cornstarch. Everyday pancakes, these are not.
Mr. Ugolick isn’t on TikTok and still hasn’t seen the videos that transformed his work life. “I’ll be very honest — I’ve never ever been a pancake person,” he said, but added that this recipe “has opened people’s eyes to what a pancake can be.” When Mr. Yoo was creating the restaurant’s menu, he wanted waffles, but pancakes made more sense logistically for the small kitchen. He never thought they’d be the hit they are. “It’s all a little crazy,” he said.
They’re so good that they are, in fact, worth hourslong waits in New York — and definitely worth making at home everywhere.
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Genevieve Ko is a deputy editor and columnist for the Food section and NYT Cooking, for which she also develops recipes.
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