Jonathan Gold weighs in on this publication's first annual (“I really hope we do this again next year”) pancake breakfast. Pancakes, bacon, coffee, booze, and all the aesthetics of a cathedral without the normally required theology. What's not to love. “They turned a church into an IHOP? Cool,” said this writer's 10 year-old daughter. Your International House of Prayer joke here _____.

But if your concerns run toward waffles more than they do toward fjord-picked garlic shoots or lovingly nurtured nectarines, you may have been at the deconsecrated St. Vibiana's in downtown L.A., washed with brilliant light, where the L.A. Weekly Pancake Breakfast filled the former cathedral with long tablesful of cooks, hundreds of happy people and a fugue of griddle vapors that William James may well have included in his Varieties of Religious Experience.

Read the complete story in Gold's Counter Intelligence, “Back to the Garden,” and check out Anne Fishbein's photo gallery.

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