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I am in an IHOP. At any rate, I think it is an IHOP.

I am here to try the pancakes.

If you are not familiar with the pancake-adjacent shenanigans, I envy you. Briefly: IHOP, last summer, renamed itself “International House of Burgers.” The Internet did not like it one bit. But now instead of giving up, IHOP is doubling down. The airwaves are liberally peppered with ads where a smiling spokeswoman says IHOP is going back to what it does best: pancakes. She then unveils a slate of burgers. Of course. It is 2019.

This double-down is like the KFC Double Down: It is a nightmare and a marketing stunt all wrapped in one. “We live in a post-truth hellscape! Come to IHOP!”

So I have come to IHOP. I am here to order a pancake (not a pancake). The menu says “Introducing Our New Pancakes*” over an enormous picture of three burgers stacked one on the other. Confusingly, one of them contains a pancake, or at least what I used to recognize as a pancake before we started to play these games with language and meaning. “*When we changed our name to IHOb (for burgers) the Internet told us to stick to pancakes. So we’re sticking to ‘pancakes.’ Hint: They’re burgers,” says the menu, which clarifies everything.

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The asterisk would be more helpful if it were not for the fact that elsewhere in the menu, being marked with an asterisk means that an item might contain raw or undercooked ingredients. Which is it, IHOP? The pancakes contain either lies or raw or undercooked ingredients (consuming raw or undercooked meats, poultry, seafood, shellfish or eggs may increase your risk of foodborne illness, especially if you have certain medical conditions). I guess there is only one way to find out. Who knows which is ultimately worse for the digestion!

The menu in general is not mendacious or overpromising. It is certainly not on par with the Cheesecake Factory menu, an artifact in its own right, full of caverns of impossible promise, like someone noticed midway through that half the things on it were totally unrealizable and decided to keep promising more rather than turn back, the Fyre Festival of menus. No, the IHOP menu is not there yet. It just sort of goes along confidently for a while promising things you feel it can deliver, and then it springs Tilapia Florentine on you. But is the tilapia also a pancake? I am not sure what on this menu, if pressed, will stand and claim to be a pancake. I do not wish to find out. (“I am a pancake.” The steak tips rise up. “I AM A PANCAKE.” The tilapia joins them. “I AM A PANCAKE!” The milkshakes are now pancakes.)

The waiter (pancake) is here. “I would like the garlic butter … pancake,” I say.

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“You want the burger, right?” my waiter asks.

“Yes,” I say.

Is the problem here to do with the essence of the pancake or my knowledge of what it means to be a pancake? Is IHOP capable of assigning pancake-ness to any substance it pleases? Why am I so resistant to this, persisting in the feeling that this is a burger instead of gladly accepting that it is not one? (Room 101, but make it brands!)

Assume that we are all inside a cave, where we sit on one side of an enormous IHOP booth, staring at a menu, which contains the shadows or images of foods of which we as yet know nothing, which pass before us in a slow parade. Suppose one day someone were to break us free of our fetters so that we could turn and look at the food that passed. Our eyes would be dazzled with it. Only after great effort and adjustment could we turn our contemplation from the food to the force behind these items that gives them their form and their being, the great IHOP.

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Then suppose that a trolley labeled Pancakes is careening down the track toward two burgers, one labeled Burger and the other labeled Pancake. On another length of track —

But my pancake has arrived.

I thought I got a plain iced coffee, but it’s sweetened and has milk in it and possibly a flavor. But this could just be the post-truth atmosphere in which we are now dwelling.

It does not look like a pancake. My mind rebels against me. I wish to look at it and not lie that I see a pancake, but really to see one. So I try. It has befriended some french fries, which not many pancakes are capable of. It glistens with butter, and it partakes of many of the attributes of pancakes. It is round and warm and contains carbohydrates. It is sort of fawn-colored, as pancakes are. I am sure Sarah Sanders would agree it was a pancake. It would make a decent projectile, as a pancake would. But it also contains a beef patty, cheese, tomato, lettuce and sliced onion. At least, what I am accustomed to referring to as a beef patty, cheese, tomato, lettuce and sliced onion. These might very well all be pancakes. I no longer am entirely sure what a pancake is. Maybe I am a pancake.

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I pick the pancake* up and eat it with my hands as I would if it were — something different. Then I remember and put it down and attempt to eat it with the fork and knife provided.

Maybe I am trying to take this too far. But so much these days is assigned the wrong name. And so much hinges on the assigning of names. What is a concentration camp? Is “sex with underage women“ really the best way of describing what Jeffrey Epstein is accused of? And this is just a marketing thing. This is — fun, I think. I can almost remember fun.

Whatever it is sits there on its oval plate.

I want it to be a pancake. And I am capable of believing impossible things. I once drank an entire strawberry milkshake I had been given by mistake, under the misapprehension that it was just a very strange way for a coffee milkshake to taste. My mind is not incapable of such flexibility.

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If I were really trying to do this right, I would have gotten to this object before we weighed it down with labels and attempted to penetrate its essence. Maybe it is a pancake. Maybe I am being too hard on it. Maybe pancakes and burgers have no independent existence and exist only as forms or ideas in the mind of IHOP?

The bill says it’s a burger.

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