The picture above isn’t the best as I used my cameraphone and then cleaned it up a bit in Photoshop. That’s blueberry, not black burnt spots. But really, isn’t a somewhat imperfect picture just right for a greasy spoon?

Lincoln Street Diner (which was, up until recently, known as Ziffy’s Lincoln Street Diner… aka “Ziffy’s”) is a place where the sausage gravy flows like wine. I avoid the sausage gravy and grits heart-buster that the place is known for, but this little place, in the Fall Creek neighborhood of Ithaca, does a good job with omelettes, homefries, bacon, sandwiches, and other diner-style fare.

This morning, I ordered a shortstack of blueberry pancakes. This is not the sort of place where you can easily get away with asking about locally sourced ingredients, but everything IS homemade and I definitely saw a real, live actual blueberry that didn’t quite adhere onto the batter on my plate. It almost certainly didn’t come from a local patch, but it also didn’t come from a tub of INDUSTRIAL BLUEBERRY PANCAKE MIX #237428. I’m not really a pancake eater, but I can do them blueberry-style as blueberries make everything all the more palatable. The pancakes tasted buttery enough without slathering on more of the giant mound of lipid that you can just see off to the left of the photo. The shortstack consists of two large pancakes and I couldn’t make it through the whole thing. In the future, I think I’ll stick with maybe one pancake and some eggs.

The Lincoln Street Diner is also the sort of place that keeps a bottle of hot sauce on every table, menus in a little box on the wall next to each table, has bright green paint, a varied cast of characters, and, if you go often enough, you will certainly become a regular.

Lincoln Street Diner
(607) 216-1616
309 E Lincoln St
Ithaca, NY 14850