The Ihop in Cambridge has closed quietly at 16 Eliot St. after a decade, with even its all-day breakfast and and late-night hours failing to catch on in Harvard Square.
“We know they struggled,” said Denise Jillson, executive director of the Harvard Square Business Association, reached Tuesday by phone. She described parking occasionally at the parking garage near the International House of Pancakes franchise “and you’d never see anyone in there. Sometimes we wondered how they stayed open.”
In a square typically full of students and tourists, Jillson felt Ihop’s lower prices and all-day breakfast would be attractive – but perhaps people preferred businesses such as the square’s funky Friendly Toast, she said. At one time, Zoe’s at 1105 Massachusetts Ave. could have been another distraction from the chain, though that storefront on the fringes of the square has also had its troubles: Zoe’s is gone, and a business called Beyond Full more recently struggled there and closed. “They tried so hard, and it never took off,” Jillson said of Beyond Full, a burger joint and diner.
The square seemed like a prime location for an Ihop, having gone without an all-day, late-night breakfast dive since 1997, when the tiny, no-frills 24-hour Tasty Sandwich Shop closed after 81 years – a closing residents have never stopped mourning. The lack of love didn’t surprise Federico Muchnik, who celebrated The Tasty in his 2005 documentary, “Touching History.”
“The Tasty was always a mom-and-pop with character to spare, disarmingly low-tech and lo-fi,” Muchnik said Tuesday. “Ihop was a chain, an international brand with ads. It’s not a place to go and just hang out forever. At The Tasty, you never got the check until you asked for it.”
The Ihop location is locked and packed up, with signs in the windows announcing the closing and diverting its customers to one on Soldiers Field Road in Brighton. A request for information to the chain’s corporate offices was not immediately returned.
The pancake restaurant was granted 4 a.m. licensing after opening, but never the 24-hour operation it boasts in other areas. The chain, founded in the 1950s, reportedly has just short of 1,700 restaurants, most recently sharing space with Applebee’s and promoting new Dubai pancakes. It boasted in 2023 of having 1,790 restaurants in the United States and a dozen other countries, but the figure hasn’t been updated since by the company. The Mashed website says the chain faces a number of troubles.
New managers would come to the Harvard Square Ihop who were excited to get involved in the community and grow a customer base, but that “just never materialized,” and the chain let its business association membership lapse, Jillson said.
When the restaurant closed is unknown. The phone number there goes unanswered; food options on the website are grayed out and cannot be selected for online ordering.
There is brighter news on the way for the square in the opening of the About Thyme Bakery & Café at 1 Brattle Square, serving Lebanese street food “unlike anything we have now,” Jillson said, and a Chicha San Chen tea shop. (A different kind of tea shop, Kong Mountain Tea, appeared at the end of June before the License Commission to take over the space at 1132 Massachusetts Ave.) A Gen Korean BBQ House is due in early 2027 at 26 Brattle St.
The Gyu-Kaku Japanese BBQ and the Too Hot restaurants are neighbors to the former Ihop at the 16-18 Eliot St. building, owned by Raj Dhanda’s Charles River Holdings. A Curry Chapter restaurant in the building is labeled as being closed temporarily. Dhanda also owns the Crimson Galeria, another building with restaurants, at 57 John F. Kennedy St. next to Harvard Square’s historic Winthrop Park. The company was contacted for more information.
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