The 250th anniversary of the American Revolution may be on the horizon, but in Williamsburg, Virginia, today’s real rebellion is stacked high as locals trade muskets for mixing bowls in a battle of the batter. Drive down Richmond Road, the city’s main artery, and the smell of maple syrup practically perfumes the air.
Williamsburg boasts eight pancake houses and numerous pancake-serving restaurants—so many that the city now calls itself the Pancake Capital of the World. There’s Capital Pancake House, the Smokey Griddle, Southern Pancake and Waffle House, and the delightfully named Mama Steve’s House of Pancakes. Add to that a handful of other spots that serve the signature dish, including Old Chickahominy House and Shorty’s Diner, and you have a pretty fluffy list for a community of just 16,000 year-round residents.
This year, the famously old-timey town will celebrate its hotcake hegemony in a fitting way: with the inaugural Williamsburg Pancake Festival (September 26 and 27). The fest promises stacks on stacks, friendly competitions, and plenty of butter. But how did this syrup-soaked phenomenon take hold? And what exactly fuels the town’s insatiable hunger for pancakes?
It’s true that “pancakes were quite popular in the Colonial period because they were simply cake in a pan,” says Frank Clark, master of historic foodways at Colonial Williamsburg. “They typically had a sweetness in them, sugar in some form or another. The one thing they didn’t have was artificial leaven. So what you have to imagine is something more like a crepe.”
George Washington had a soft spot for pancakes’ country cousin, the humble hoecake—so named because early versions were cooked right on the flat end of a garden hoe. He liked them unapologetically drowning in butter and honey, and one can imagine that the House of Burgesses member expected a plate when he rolled into Williamsburg. The twist? Back then, pancakes of any variety weren’t a breakfast indulgence at all; colonists served them as a side with dinner.
In Billyburg today, however, the flapjack fixation is firmly fixed to the a.m., and I knew if I wanted to get to the bottom of Battergate, I needed to pull on some eatin’ pants and enter the city’s cake cathedrals. But my mere appetite would not do. I required a bottomless pit of a belly, someone with a metabolism faster than a toddler on red dye and Pixy Stix and the willpower of a wet nap at a barbecue competition. I needed a ten-year-old boy. Luckily, I have one.
So the first weekend of August, with my human trash compactor of a son in tow, I slid into a booth at Not Another Pancake House (our first of multiple breakfasts). We met Athena Kokolis, whose husband, Marinos, opened the diner with his five brothers in 2019.
“Williamsburg is a retirement town,” Kokolis told me. Mindful of fixed budgets, “a lot of those folks prefer to eat out for breakfast or lunch, but not dinner.” That dependable morning crowd—regulars she sees three or four times a week—is the heartbeat of Williamsburg’s pancake business. The powdered sugar on top are the tourists, who, Kokolis says, fuel up on pancakes before vanishing into Busch Gardens, Colonial Williamsburg, Kings Dominion, or Water Country USA.
Greek families have long been the flame keepers, flipping Williamsburg’s most golden tradition for generations. “Greeks control the pancake house business here,” says Dean Canavos, third-generation restaurateur and owner of Capital Pancake House. The dynasty began in the ’40s and ’50s, when Greeks in nearby Newport News migrated to Williamsburg, he says. One relative would open a restaurant, then pull in friends and family to bus tables, wash dishes, and work the line—until they’d saved enough to fire up a griddle of their own. Many, like Canavoss’s father, Sammy, would work hard from the busy season of Memorial Day to Labor Day, then have enough money to fly back to Greece in the offseason.
Decades later, at least four of those founding families are still manning the stations at spots like Mama Steve’s, Colonial Pancake House, and Astronomical Pancake House. In true small-town fashion, some have even joined forces. “George at Colonial? He married my cousin,” Canavos says.
And while there was once a brief era of fierce competition among pancake producers, Canavos says those days are long gone. In this battle for the perfect pancake, the rivalries are friendly, the syrup flows freely, and everyone’s a winner.
The first Williamsburg Pancake Festival takes place September 26 & 27, with a ticketed celebration at the Hellenic Center on day one followed by a Duke of Gloucester Street World Pancake Eating Championship on day two. Find more information here.
