The Battlefield Restaurant has a pancake on the menu that’s the size of a medium pizza and more than enough for a breakfast entrée. The question is, how do you flip it on the grill?
“I can do it with one spatula,” said diner owner and operator Cindy Jenkins, who claimed it’s all in the wrist. “My son uses two.”
With a giant pancake on the grill, the cook flipped it with one spatula. “That was luck,” he said. It’s served with syrup and a slab of butter the size of a saltine cracker.
And so goes the morning breakfast shift at the Fredericksburg eatery. It was the middle of the week, and all the regulars filtered in and out. Nearby resident Faye Myers opted for the omelet instead of the pancake.
“It’s got so much stuff on it,” she said of her omelet. “We’ve been coming here for most of our lives,” she said. That’s how it is with most customers, including a crowd that gathered at the end table. Myers said it was the “men’s table,” and that’s the way it is around there. “Clean my plate off like my momma told me,” said one from the men’s table.
He didn’t have the pancake.
The Battlefield Restaurant sits near the city’s downtown, across the street from the Fredericksburg Battlefield Visitors Center, and next to a Civil War relic store. It’s on a stretch of Lafayette Boulevard known as “deadman’s curve” because of the number of car crashes, said Myers. There is a collection of pictures and paintings on the wall donated by residents, including a few paintings of the restaurant by John W. Edwards, a regular at the men’s table.
The interior is decorated with a Fredericksburg mural featuring two unidentified people, a framed ticket stub from the “hardtop races” at Fredericksburg Speedway, and a couple of neon “open” signs flickering in the window.
The menu has a breakfast and lunch section, but everything is under $10. It’s loosely put together, with sections for “Hearty Fixins,” “Breakfast Fixins,” and “Eggs & Such.” The restaurant is closed for dinner.
Although “Battlefield” is in the name, the focus is not the Civil War. There are a couple of shelves with antique items and one picture of R.E. Lee strategizing with another soldier called “Tactics and Strategy,” but that’s about it.
The food and the local slant are thick, though, as thick as the pancake.
