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Best Pancakes at the Worst Restaurant
Nicolas Cage was in Little Rock last month.
I learned this fact from a recent short piece in AY Magazine noting that filming for the movie Best Pancakes in the Country, starring Cage, was starting to wrap up. Apparently, the action movie has exactly one setting, a small-town diner, and takes place over the course of one night, rather like the odd-“bottle episode” of a television show. It didn’t take long to find out where filming was happening: the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas (EOA) media editor, Starr Carr, located a Reddit thread about a movie being made in Pinnacle Valley, and an email to a friend in the media confirmed it.
I pulled up the location online and was hit with a very powerful memory.
You see, the building where this movie was being filmed was the former location of the Pinnacle Valley Restaurant. Years ago, my wife and I would occasionally cycle out around Two Rivers Park (site of the former county penal farm) or hike Pinnacle Mountain or nearby trails, and we ended our excursions pretty hungry. Sure, there was always the option of packing up the bicycles and driving somewhere for lunch, but how nice would it be to cycle up to a restaurant for a spell? So when we saw the “Coming Soon” sign for Pinnacle Valley Restaurant, we were elated.
That elation did not survive even one morning. The waitress took our late-breakfast order and then disappeared for about 45 minutes, not even checking to refill our coffee. We were bordering upon ravenous when our meal finally arrived, but even I was not hungry enough for what was laid before me. “Excuse me,” I asked the waitress when she circled back around, “but I ordered one ham and cheese omelet. Why do I have two omelets?”
“Oh,” she said, “our cook read the ticket wrong and made one ham omelet and one cheese omelet, so I just brought them both out.”
“Um, okay, but I only wanted one omelet,” I insisted.
“I’m only charging you for one,” she countered and then disappeared again.
It was like that old Star Trek episode, “The Enemy Within,” wherein a malfunctioning transporter splits Captain Kirk into “good” and “bad” halves. The good half has all of Kirk’s compassion but is fundamentally incapable of making a decision, while the bad half is active but also impulsive and given to his various lusts. Neither one functions alone. But they don’t function as a group, either—you need them together.
Likewise, you can’t just eat a bite of cheese omelet and then eat a bite of ham omelet and say you’ve had a ham and cheese omelet. The parts have to be integrated into a whole. Plus, that’s four eggs—entirely out of proportion to the other ingredients.
After we had spent a total of 90 minutes there, our waitress finally reappeared with our ticket. We paid and never returned. I found some contact information for the place online and sent an email outlining my grievances, but the message I received in reply just made a lot of excuses for their situation. Not long afterward, I saw that the restaurant had closed and was up for sale. I was not surprised.
That was more than a decade ago, at the very least, and I had honestly forgotten all about that experience until my attempt at finding the location of a Nicolas Cage movie brought this memory to the fore. The Sunday after I read that article, I was once again out at Pinnacle Mountain State Park, this time hiking by myself. On my way back home, I drove by the old Pinnacle Valley Restaurant and pulled into the parking lot. The building had been painted and decorated for its use as a set, with an anthropomorphic waffle figure on the front above the entrance. Various ladders and other equipment still lay around, waiting to be packed up and hauled away.
I pulled out my phone and took a few pictures of the front of the building. One day, we’ll have an entry on this movie on the EOA, because we aim to have entries on every movie professionally filmed in Arkansas, no matter what kind of reviews it receives, no matter if it is a masterpiece or direct-to-video shlock. After all, the EOA works to be not just authoritative but also comprehensive. I might watch it myself, even though I’ve already lived through the experience of being trapped in that particular building for 90 minutes with two inedible omelets. Nicolas Cage probably has only a few bad guys with guns to deal with. No contest at all.
By Guy Lancaster, editor of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas
