IHOP - Banana Crêpes With Nutella



I assure you that there’s a lot I’ve yet to learn about how to properly appreciate and evaluate crêpes in the various ways they can be prepared and served, and these reviews will document my experiences my exploration of this field.

I tried IHOP’s “Banana Crêpes with Nutella” in June of 2015.

While as you can see in the picture, the titular hazelnut sauce is drizzled on top in what would seem to be a fairly conservative amount, my findings are that the Nutella verges on completely dominating the crêpes to the point where the crêpes themselves serve merely as a Nutella delivery system.

Its odd how I’ve enjoyed crêpes that were served completely buried beneath fruit and berries, and sometimes also oozing with sweet cream tucked away inside, and yet those dressings came nowhere close to utterly stealing the show in the way the deceptively modest looking drizzle of Nutella does in IHOP’s Banana Crêpes with Nutella.

Perhaps “Nutella served on Crêpes with Bananas” would have been a better name for this dish.

There was absolutely nothing wrong or unserviceable about what I was served, the dish fulfilled its purpose perfectly, but what I tasted was much more of a Nutella experience than a crepe experience.

Anyone who likes Nutella, which is probably most people (it’s essentially just chocolate after all, no matter how much the company insists on selling it as “hazelnut spread”), who ends up at an IHOP and sees this on the menu will be drawn by the fact that Nutella™ is in the dish’s name and try it based purely on brand recognition, even if they never tried crêpes before, and given that IHOP actually went out of their way to be able use the Nutella brand name rather than just calling it “hazelnut sauce” likely affirms that this was their specific intention.

As for the bananas, I haven’t bothered mentioning them up until now because their role in the dish to me was rather unimportant. I don’t know, but I just find bananas on pancakes, crêpes, waffles to just sort of get in the way. They ruin or demote the dish for me but if they weren’t there to begin with I personally wouldn’t have missed them at all.

With dishes like IHOP’s “Strawberries and Cream Crêpes” the berries and cream totally smother the crêpes on the plate, yet the distinct flavor and aroma of the crêpes still seems to be able to shine through as the dominant flavor on my tongue as I eat.

But with these however, the taste of the Nutella really drowned out the crêpes themselves, and the banana coins didn’t even stand a chance of making an impact to me.

Its not as though I couldn’t receive the taste or aroma of the crêpes, but the the Nutella was so loud to me as to make me vividly aware of how much of the dressing I was tasting and how much of the crêpes I wasn’t tasting, as compared to other crepe dishes I tried in the past.

Even though this was probably the distinct and deliberate intention of the minds behind this dish, and the Nutella perhaps really aught to be the star of the show for this one, with the crêpes serving as a complimentary conveyance of that flavor, sort of like how toast is to butter and jam, I personally didn’t enjoy it, though I don’t at all regret having given this one a try.

If you’re a huge fan of Nutella I expect you’ll have a blast, and if you aren’t so weirdly particular about not wanting to feel as though the taste and the actual crêpes are being “outshone” by the sauce like I am, I expect you’ll like it whether you are a Nutella fan or not.

Though I still think the bananas were kind of pointless here, though still harmless.




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