Leaflet No. 25 Cinnamon Roll Seeking Behavior
This leaflet tastes like...cinnamon, asking for directions, salted butter, berrypicking, and strawberry compote
The Original Pancake House is both a chain (over 90 franchises) and a site of restoration. Here you may order the most delightful stack of pancakes, the monstrous Dutch Baby apple pancake, or a small plate of four expertly crisped bacon with freshly squeezed OJ. Heavy generous is the hand of who is on coffee rounds, who makes sure the restaurant’s custom-made pottery mugs look the part.
I love to get the Bran Pancakes, which sounds like I am no-fun or vigilant on making daily bowel movements. But really, they are the only flapjacks I’ve had that bake yogurt and strawberries into them, turning them airy and feather boa pink. It comes with a snowball of salted butter and jammy strawberry syrup in a silver pot.
My Love got the “western omelet” this time, to be healthy. We were seated at a glossy umber booth, where I like to sit criss-cross applesauce. Along the wall was a photographic mural of fall trees, a similar scene happening somewhere else in Urbana that day.
On the day we went, all the diners seemed to be retired. “So this is what all the Urbana-Champaign retirees do on a Thursday morning”, my Michael goes.
It seemed true enough, the afforded leisure palpable in the light chatter and visual sea of bald or white mops. It is the perfect place to dine if you’ve got some pancake money. You bring your crossword, bookmarked news articles, novel, and your friend—& you hang out.
As we are heading out, I overheard an old man implore the Front-of-House with exasperation:
“Do you know of any bakeries around here that would have cinnamon rolls?!”
And I found this wholly amusing, tugging Michael’s arm to ask if he caught that too--the urgency and vulnerability in the man’s voice. I couldn’t know whether he just dined or if he was only popping in the House of Pancakes to ask the question. This only added to my intrigue.
Whatever the case, I admire in this old man the ignorance, I think. Any person connected to a digital device can tell themselves where around here they can get a cinnamon roll. To operate without this connection to a phone (and by extension, to an AI overview or sponsored, algorithmic results page), and to instead rely on the immediate local knowledge provoked my mind into finding the moment beautiful.
There is something to be said about asking others, strangers, for guidance and direction. This is a lost art and lost gift.
It requires that you are brave. You first have to realize that you don’t know where the nearest cinnamon roll could be found. You must have the resolve, humility, and courage...to consult, to admit to someone you barely know that it is something you quite need to acquire, a cinnamon roll. Please--could you help me figure this out?
This type of information-seeking additionally demands that you place trust in who you ask and what they say. We do this when we ask around for good auto shops, forgiving dentists, and coveted produce like perilla leaves and plantains.
“Where would I go for ______?” I ask my barber, my supervisor, my friend who lives in the town I’m visiting, the person still patient after I look up from my phone and flag down, my neighbor with a language barrier. From your source’s answer, you might have follow-up questions, or completely new ones.
Marcia Bates wrote a seminal document for understanding search behavior to build better interfaces, friendlier ones. She introduces the “berrypicking model” to describe how people search through evolving their questions over time as they gather new, relevant bits and pieces. Sampling information from different sources. Understanding something results from a mapping of the various sources you’ve picked and how those sources relate to each other (sometimes citation chaining). You could take the metaphor further so that, after you’ve gone berrypicking, you make a pie. Maybe share it too.
I like the premise of cooking with local knowledge. The soft influencing we exchange based on experiential learning connects us to those around and what came before us.
We also rely on these physical places and services to sustain and maintain themselves somehow, so by the time we arrive, what we seek is still there. Miraculously. The bakery that has cinnamon rolls daily…who gets its flour from the faithful suppliers...the faithful field of wheat...the faithful sun & rain cycle.
It is likely that as platforms have capitalized on the way we are influenced by word of mouth (the rise of the Influencer class now affecting *how* we are influenced), I recognized how nice it was, then, to see this old man seek a cinnamon roll outside of these exhausting games.
If he knew how many looping tiktok’s have been created of people pulling apart buns to get pornographic shots of icing oozing about, would he lose his appetite? Or maybe get lost by the reel to follow: a puppy named “Cinnamon Bun” getting a spa-day. Another reel about cutting into inanimate objects to reveal cake.
How silly it all is to be duped and distracted. The drafted information map turns in on itself; you’ve fallen into a rabbit-hole-worm-hole. I should have just asked the girl on the bench where she got that smoothie. Information overload, what is new?
Now I have no idea whether this man received the intel he needed. Was he ever fulfilled with the bun of his cravings? As I write this, I feel ashamed I didn’t whisk back to him and offer my understanding of the town’s cinnamon roll landscape, thereby suggesting Rick’s Bakery on Main. It is likely the Front-of-House shrugged the old man off, since the lobby was full of hungry arrivals. I hope I am wrong.
What I still wonder is why he was asking about cinnamon rolls at The Original Pancake House—another beautiful, unanswered mystery.
May we fill the information gaps unto others as they would fill unto us. And soon, maybe we will give rise to an Original Cinnamon Roll House.
Tiramisu-seeking,
Isabel
This was truly a delightful friday morning read 🥞😌