How to Make Golden Diner’s Pancakes at Home

Food|People Line Up for Hours for These Pancakes. Now You Don’t Have To.

A few weeks ago, Golden Diner, a restaurant in Manhattan’s Chinatown, began taking reservations for weekend brunch, years after the wait for a table could stretched to two, sometimes three, hours. But the crowds have not diminished. Everyone is willing to stand in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge for the chef Sam Yoo’s pancakes.

Recipe: Golden Diner Pancakes

In 2019, Mr. Yoo opened Golden Diner, where his takes on classic diner dishes weave in playful Asian inflections like a highway zipper merge done right. Diners regularly filled the seats at the counter and small tables along it, and then, in October 2023, someone posted the pancakes on TikTok, then others did as well. The masses arrived, lines outside grew, sales jumped.

What Mr. Yoo thought might be a blip turned into a pivotal moment. “I never created the pancakes to go viral or for the Instagram crowd,” he said. “As a chef, I needed them to be beautiful because you eat with your eyes first, but I wanted to know, ‘Is it balanced? Is it familiar but refreshing in taste and concept?’” After researching and testing countless batches of pancakes, he landed on what has become a new classic.

Along with the internet rise of the Golden Diner pancakes came copycat recipes. Mr. Yoo declined to share his version until now.