A co-worker of my wife was telling her of a new breakfast place over in Moline that she thought was pretty good. My wife was telling me that the lady was talking the place up, so much so that she even put it on par with Jimmy's Pancake House which is our gold standard for breakfasts in the Quad Cities. (Click here to see the entry on Jimmy's.) I said that I had to check this place out. On a recent Sunday morning we drove over to Flip's Pancake House.
Sam and Fatima Abduli are veterans of the restaurant business. They ran a small restaurant - Sam's Ice Box - before moving to the Quad Cities to open the Milan Family Restaurant in the early 1990's. The Abduli's ran the restaurant for 21 years before Sam decided to retire. They leased the restaurant and drifted into retirement.
But retirement didn't sit well with Sam and he knew that he needed to keep working. The long-time local favorite Bon-Air Tavern and Liquor Store had closed and the building became available. The Abduli's leased the building and oversaw a six month rehab of the space - even keeping the old circular corner booths that were popular at the Bon-Air - before opening in March of this year. They had four different names for the restaurant and they decided to let their daughters and grandchildren vote on the name. They voted on Flip's - a fitting name for a pancake house.
Flip's Pancake House is sort of hard to get to - it's on 27th Street next to I-74 and near John Deere Road. But you can't get there from John Deere Road. We came down 27th Street from the Avenue of the Cities and pulled in to the good sized parking lot. (see map)
The interior of Flip's is open and well-lit. It's not overly large, but there's ample enough seating for the customers. It has a number of tables in the middle of the floorspace, booths along the walls and a small breakfast bar.
We took a booth by the front window and a waitress came over with a couple menus for us. Of course, pancakes are the main item at Flip's Pancake House, but they also had skillet breakfasts, Eggs Benedict, cereals, biscuits and sausage gravy, omelets and waffles. They're open 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. so they also have sandwiches, burgers and salads on the menu.
I went with the French toast with blueberries and a side of corned beef hash. The French toast featured six half-pieces of thick Texas toast battered and grilled. The blueberries were fresh and flavorful. The corned beef hash was almost laughable - it was a small amount and it was pretty basic corned beef hash out of a can. It wasn't anywhere close to the $3.99 they charged for it as a side. But the French toast was good and filling. It was an all right breakfast.
Cindy got the Greek skillet with gyro meat, potatoes and onions topped with scrambled egg whites. She had a choice of either toast or pancakes and she wanted to see how good the pancakes were at Flip's. She thought the skillet was fine, it had an adequate amount of gyro meat mixed in with the eggs and hash browns. The pancakes - she wasn't quite so enamored with. I had a bite and agreed with her. Jimmy's Pancake House continues to be our go-to place for a great breakfast in the Quad Cities.
That's not to say that the breakfast at Flip's Pancake House was bad - it was far from it. We were oversold on the place from my wife's co-worker. We expected a lot more, but what we found at Flip's Pancake House was an adequate and slightly above-average breakfast with good service and prices that were a tad high compared to other breakfast places in the area. Flip's is worth trying and probably going back to once you realize that it's an average to slightly above average place to get breakfast in the Quad Cities.
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