Batter Up

Gladstone’s chocolate cake not big enough? Arnie Morton’s two-pound Porterhouse too wee? Oki Dog’s teriyaki steak burrito not tipping your scale? Check out the oven-baked German pancake at the Westchester coffee shop Dinah’s, a satellite dish of a pancake, a Dodger Stadium of a pancake, the batter-butter equivalent of those radio telescopes that measure quasar radiation from deep space. “A Must for Out-of-Town Guests,” says the menu, and why not? Dinah’s is right on the way to the passenger terminals, and the pancake is approximately the size and shape of the Theme Building at LAX.

It’s brown around the edges, this thing, crisp and spongy like a giant Yorkshire pudding, thickening into a dense, moist, springy crepe as you descend into the pancake’s interior, sourdough nearly as tart as Ethiopian injera bread. Two paper pill-cups of whipped butter lean against one another in the depths of the pancake, and by the time the dish gets to table, the butter has melted into something of a cappuccino effect, a thick, creamy layer of butter foam atop a clear yellow liquid thin enough to drizzle across the pancake. On a separate dish is a small bowl of powdered sugar, also half a dozen lemon wedges, which cut through the richness and can give the pancake a sort of Keebler lemon creme effect if you work it right. One pancake feeds three.

Dinah’s itself is almost a museum of coffee shop decor, four decades worth, from Sputnik-inflected flagstone neo-Talesin era of the late ‘50s through dribs of the ‘60s colonial phase, flat ‘70s graphics and ziggurat-inspired ‘80s Deco-ish chrome-and-glass hanging lamps, goofy ‘50s tile work and sleek ‘80s art posters and ‘60s sconces that look like Amazon breastplates. If you can trust the menu, the exterior sports what may be the very first sign in the L.A. area shaped like a chicken bucket, and somebody should alert the Smithsonian. Mostly, though, there are plaster flying saucers hovering beneath the ceiling, painted Bicentennial red and blue, decked out with hanging coach lamps, and even bigger than the German pancakes.

You could probably go to Dinah’s and order something other than German pancakes: peppery fried chicken that tastes a lot like the Broasted stuff used to in the ‘60s, chicken pot pie served in the kind of hollowed-out bread loaf your aunt might use as a container for clam dip, bacon cheeseburgers with homemade thousand island dressing. Mashed potatoes are as lumpy as a mattress in a youth hostel, indisputably made from scratch. For gluttons, there’s usually all-you-can-eat chicken or fish or beef stroganoff on weekdays.

But basically, there are other pancakes--lumpy apple pancakes the size of Chicago-style pizzas that taste like apple fritters with extra cinnamon. You roll thin, crisp Swedish pancakes around sour cream and lingonberry preserves. Crepe-like French pancakes come pre-rolled around flavored butter. Potato pancakes are less the thick latkes you find at places like Juniors and Nate ‘n’ Al’s than sour, lacy-edged crepes that happen to have a little grated potato stirred into the batter--not bad, actually. The regular pancakes and silver-dollar pancakes and chocolate pancakes are really not much different from what you’d find at a chain such as Denny’s, but at pancake-intensive times of day, particularly weekend mornings, the wait to get in can stretch an hour or more.

* Dinah’s Restaurant

6521 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 645-0456. Open daily, 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. All major credit cards accepted. Lot parking. No alcohol. Takeout. Breakfast for two, food only, $6 to $14.