In the interest of content and MORE ACTION I’m going to try out some shorter posts about interesting places I’ve been recently.
Cartwright’s Maple Tree Inn is one of those places your friends keep on telling you about. At least when you have friends like mine. And this wasn’t just from food people or my good friend Chris Clemens either who wrote a great piece on Cartwright’s for Exploring Upstate with some history of the places and the people behind it. Even coworkers were telling me to make the drive from Rochester out to Angelica, NY so I finally did!
It was a beautiful cold and sunny Sunday so the wife and I packed up the car and made the winding trip down. We arrived an hour before closing and thankfully only had a 10 minute wait before being seated in one of the dining areas. Cartwright’s is famous for their maple syrup made on site and their all you can eat buckwheat pancakes made from their custom flour blend. Apparently they have gone through multiple expansions over the years including flat top stations in each of the rooms which helps them get pile after pile of buckwheat cakes hot to your table.
I dug into cakes served along with a couple of subtle sausage patties and proper over easy eggs which made for a delightful savory-sweet combo with the syrup. The cakes themselves were very well done with buckwheat being the dominant flavor and any sweetness coming from the light maple syrup. The syrup itself was relatively light but more flavorful than any “pancake syrup” you see in a cabin or lady themed bottle in the supermarket.
We also walked away with a sugar bomb of a pie they called the Coconut Maple Crunch that plays like a maple infused pecan pie with the extra addition of coconut. It was damn tasty but made my teeth hurt and gave me a serious sugar rush. Plenty of other pie and maple products to garb here including bottles of their maple syrup to use at home.
After all that, I’d definitely recommend making the trip out to visit this gem in the middle of the country to get your pancake on. Make sure you’re hungry and ready to wait in line but these tasty cakes really did live up to the hype and I’m ready to make it a new tradition for the wife and I. They’re only open until April 215 so get a move on it!
For reference:
Hours
Tuesday – Friday: 9am – 8pm
Saturday: 8am – 8pm
Sunday: 8am – 6pm
Closed Mondays and Easter Sunday