I Can Now Eat My Favorite Dessert for Breakfast, Thanks to This Pancake

While all buttery, syrup-covered pancakes blur the line between breakfast and dessert, the Sticky Toffee Pancakes from Lord’s in New York City make the two meals entirely interchangeable. This jaw-dropping pancake (yes, a singular pancake with the height of a traditional diner stack) graced my Instagram explore page late at night and I immediately set a calendar reminder for the following morning to figure out just how to taste it. When it comes to matters of such seriousness, I work fast — within a week, the pancake was on my plate. 

This, though, is not just any other pancake. For Chef Ed Szymanski, a 2023 Food & Wine Best New Chef, these Sticky Toffee Pancakes have been long in the works. The dream brunch became reality in early February when the team at Lord’s, whose menu focuses on meat-forward British classics, threw a pop-up brunch that sold out within hours. The menu for Lord’s full English brunch featured the restaurant’s classic curried lamb scotch egg, Bubble & Squeak, a rarebit cheeseburger, and of course, a full English breakfast — black pudding and all. The menu’s star was a pancake that could be just as easily shared by a four-top as it could be gobbled up by one hungry diner who’d most likely leave with a worthwhile toffee sauce stomach ache.

What ultimately sets this pancake apart is its fluffy yet crispy texture. “The batter is just like the one we use for the sticky toffee pudding,” Szymanski tells me as he grates lemon zest over dark brown sugar, the first step in the making of the pancake batter. He adds two eggs and whisks vigorously for a few minutes, turning glossy eggs into a bubbly and airy mixture. “We use the same technique as batter for the fish and chips at Dame, where you want to incorporate a lot of air and rise into the batter so that while cooking it, it holds that air to make a light structure.” Szymanski’s iconic fish and chips at his first restaurant Dame, a seafood-centric spot just a few blocks from Lord’s, have a shatteringly crisp, fluffy fried exterior.

After whipping the eggs, Szymanski adds milk, flour, and a lot of baking powder, the latter of which reacts with the moisture in the batter to add a lot of lift. He also stirs in torn, tender, high-quality dates, that melt into the pancake as it cooks. Before frying the batter in clarified butter, Szymanski lets it sit on the counter for a few minutes to help  the baking powder activate, leading to big air bubbles in the pancake.

The batter is fried until crisp in a pan, then finished in the oven before being topped with a quenelle of tangy creme fraiche and a big sprinkling of flaky sea salt — two savory ingredients that perfectly cut through the fatty sweetness of the pancake. The entire thing gets topped with silky toffee sauce with a caramelized bittersweet flavor. 

This perfect pancake is only available for a limited run during brunch at Lord’s.