What is The Original Pancake House?
Attached to a Motel 6 at the corner of 68th Street and Camelback Road, in the shadow of Fashion Square’s parking decks, is the restaurant Scottsdale has been lining up for on Sunday mornings since 1988.
The Original Pancake House is a franchise of the Portland, Oregon chain that Les and Erma Hueneke founded in 1953, and it follows the chain’s peculiar tradition of living beside a motel — here, a Motel 6 built in 1965 as the budget chain’s first Arizona property. Ron Horton took the motel’s restaurant space in early 1988, spent roughly $400,000 and, by his own account, was there around the clock through a two-year recession to make it work. Thirty-eight years later he is still there, known to regulars as “the pancake man,” with general manager Connie Miller running the floor.
The reason for the lines is in the oven. The Dutch Baby — a rich egg-batter pancake that puffs up like a soufflé and falls the moment it is served, finished with lemon and powdered sugar — is the signature and Horton’s own favorite. The apple pancake, loaded with sautéed apples and cinnamon glaze and big enough for two, is the best seller. Everything is made from scratch daily: unbleached flour, fresh eggs, cream, butter, no packaged mixes.
Hours are 7 am to 1 pm, Tuesday through Sunday, closed Mondays. The honest verdict is that this is one of the last true old-Scottsdale breakfast rooms — older than most of Old Town’s brunch scene, unbothered by it, and serving the same pancake it served the year The Phoenician opened.
How to eat at the pancake house without waiting for it
Order the Dutch Baby before anything else. It is baked to order and takes time; the kitchen will not rush it, and the reward is watching it arrive still puffed and then sink in front of you. Squeeze the lemon, dust the sugar, and eat it while it’s hot — a cold Dutch Baby is a sad thing. If two of you are ordering, one Dutch Baby and one apple pancake, shared, is the classic table.
Respect the apple pancake’s size. It is an oven-baked slab of batter and sautéed apples under a cinnamon glaze, and it will feed two adults with an omelet on the side. The peach cobbler crepes — simmered in peach brandy sauce, topped with whipped cream and graham cracker crumbles — are the third pillar, and the buttermilk stacks and omelets are quietly excellent for the person who wants an ordinary breakfast done properly.
Beat the Sunday line. The room is walk-in only and Sunday brings multi-generational lines from mid-morning. Tuesday through Friday at 7 sharp, you sit immediately. If you must do Sunday, arrive before 8 or accept the wait as part of the experience — it is, for a lot of families, a tradition in itself.
Remember the hours. Doors close at 1 pm and the restaurant is closed all day Monday. That schedule has stranded more visitors than any other in Scottsdale. Logistics. Free parking in the shared lot with the motel; the entrance faces Camelback Road. Prices are a fair level two. The location is a five-minute walk from Scottsdale Fashion Square and a short drive from the Hotel Valley Ho, which makes it the right breakfast for anyone staying in Old Town who wants something older than the hotel.
The motel pancake house that outlasted the neighborhood
The Original Pancake House model is a mid-century artifact. The Huenekes built their Portland original in 1953 on the theory that travelers wanted a real breakfast next to their motel, and the franchise’s locations still favor that adjacency. Scottsdale’s version fits perfectly: the Motel 6 at 68th and Camelback was the chain’s first Arizona outpost in 1965, when Camelback Road was the two-lane approach to a resort town. The restaurant space beside it went through tenants for two decades before Horton took it in 1988 — the same year The Phoenician opened up the hill and Scottsdale’s 1980s boom crested.
Timing was against him at first. The late-1980s recession hit Arizona’s real estate economy hard, and a $400,000 franchise bet on a motel restaurant on the edge of a shopping mall could easily have failed. Horton’s answer was presence — he was, by his own telling, there 24/7 — and product. A pancake made fresh daily from flour, eggs, cream and butter was a differentiator in 1988, when most breakfast chains had gone to mixes, and the Dutch Baby was an oddity most Scottsdale diners had never seen.
The restaurant’s real achievement is what it did not do. Old Town’s breakfast culture transformed around it: The Breakfast Club and the boozy-brunch generation arrived, Butterfield’s and Butters built the mid-2000s pancake boom in the Ranches, and the Fashion Square blocks turned over completely. The pancake house changed nothing — not the hours, not the batter, not the Motel 6. Customers who report fifteen and twenty-five years of patronage are describing the same meal.
Honest assessment: this is a franchise, the room is plain, and the closed-Monday, done-at-one schedule is genuinely inconvenient. None of that has ever mattered to the Sunday line. Alongside The Sugar Bowl, it is one of the few Old Town-adjacent rooms where a family can eat the same thing its grandparents ate, in the same seat, and the Dutch Baby remains the best five-minute theater in Scottsdale breakfast.