All the things I love about the pancakes at Chez Ma Tante, near the Greenpoint waterfront in Brooklyn, are things that normal chefs would try to fix. They are a little too tall and too big around. The outside is nearly black in parts, and crunchy, which American pancakes almost never are.

What they most closely resemble are the pancakes I’ve made on camping trips, from a mix, with about a quarter-stick of melted butter in a smoking-hot pan over a fire. Each one is the size of Frisbee because too many people are waiting for breakfast for any space in the pan to be wasted.

Assuming my campfire pancakes were to catch a chef’s eye, the standard way of turning them into a brunch dish would be to refine them. The heat would come down so they’d cook to an even golden-brown. My quantity of butter would seem insane in a professional kitchen, so it would be cut. The batter would probably be thinned to make the pancakes shorter and more elegantly rounded.

Rounding out the rough edges is, in a broad sense, one of the main things chefs do. They may not always do it consciously, any more than a copy editor consciously corrects typos. It’s supposed to become a reflex, which is the point of the sign on the kitchen wall at Eleven Madison Park: MAKE IT NICE.