Despite high gas and food prices, the local restaurant scene remains as lively as ever. New eateries are welcomed like rock stars and it’s often tough to get a seat at some of the more popular lunch spots in the valley.

The opening of the new IHOP in Lewiston Orchards is no exception. I’ve sampled the food there three times — once for breakfast, once for coffee and breakfast, and once for dinner. The food’s so-so and fairly typical of what is often found in chain restaurants. Restaurants like IHOP, Applebee’s and Red Lobster rely on a menu formulated at company headquarters, which is then prepackaged and delivered to the individual franchises. It homogenizes the dining experience, which is good if you like predictability, but not so good if you prefer a more regional menu. Put more bluntly, you won’t find regional favorites like bite-size steak and Sharp’s-style fry sauce on the menu at chain restaurants.

Back to IHOP. The wait staff seems to be well trained and is fairly efficient. My first visit was several days after the restaurant opened. My order was simple — a child’s hamburger and a salad. Not much could go wrong with that and it didn’t.

My next visit came when I took my nephew out for dinner and he asked to go to IHOP. I wouldn’t have gone again so soon otherwise. He ordered a full breakfast — pancakes, hashbrowns, eggs and sausage. The portions were huge. He made it through the pancakes, but ran out of room (and he’s a 16-year-old boy) before he could finish the eggs and hashbrowns. I ordered a small portion of the prime rib. The salad was wrong and had to be sent back. By that time, my meal had been served. The prime rib had good flavor, but nearly half of the portion was fat, something I don’t enjoy eating straight. The vegetables were a simple California blend, cooked in water. They could have been drained a little better, as they left a little puddle of water on the plate and made the potato a bit soggy.

My most recent visit was to meet on my Edge readers for coffee. I grabbed a spot of breakfast at the same time. It was hard finding entrees that were light on the carbs while also going light on fat and calories. IHOP is another one of those chain restaurants that refuses to provide nutritional information for its menu items. Instead, it offers IHOP For Me, a scant few entrees and breakfasts that are touted as being less than 600 calories and less than 15 grams of fat. They can’t seem to put the few calories together with the carb conscious entrees. One breakfast item advertised as being carb conscious featured four eggs, three strips of bacon, three link sausages and three grilled ham strips. Carb conscious? Yes. Healthy? Nooooo. My final choice was egg and toast, hold the butter.

The verdict on IHOP? It enjoys great national exposure from its TV spots, but if you want a truly great breakfast, I’d recommend sticking with one of the terrific local restaurants we have here. The Lunchbox in North Lewiston offers great scratch-made breakfasts and lunches. (Best scrambled eggs I’ve ever had.) They’re open for breakfast from 8 to 10:30 a.m. Monday through Friday and from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sundays.

Happy Day Corp. has also embraced weekend breakfast service. Both Zany Graze and Main Street Deli are open for breakfast. I’m also told Hazel’s in Clarkston serves up a terrific breakfast/lunch menu. I haven’t tried any of those out yet. Anyone out there given them a try?

My picks for the best breakfast in the region:

1. The Lunchbox in North Lewiston
2. The Rivers Cafe in Kooskia. This is a nod to my old hometown favorite. The biscuits and gravy are superb. Best of all, it’s real sausage gravy, not that fake packaged variety so many restaurants use.
3. The Pantry at the University Inn in Moscow. Nice variety and an excellent atmosphere. They’ll also customize an order to almost any taste.
4. Waffles N More in Lewiston. Good home cooking, good service, great waffles and pancakes and good coffee.

What are your favorites?

Chef Robert Irvine isn’t going to be able to cook his way out of this one.

Two years ago, the showy British chef showed up on Food Network as the frontman for “Dinner Impossible.” The intro ran down his impressive background — cooking for the British royal family and serving as a White House chef, among others. He was even said to be have been knighted by the queen. He was given “missions,” which involved turning out an impressive menu of food in eight hours or less, under sometimes “impossible” conditions.

Turns out, though, Irvine’s a bragging, boastful liar. He was outed in an extensive story Feb. 17 in the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times.

The knighthood?

Buckingham Palace says, “He is not a KCVO Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order and he wasn’t given a castle by the queen of England.”

What about the White House?

Walter Scheib, White House executive chef from 1994to 2005 says, “Irvine’s ONLY connection with the White House is through the Navy Mess facility in the West Wing … never in the period from 4/4/94 until 2/4/05 did he have ANYTHING to do with the preparation, planning, or service of any State Dinner or any other White House Executive Residence food function, public or private.”

He also claimed to own a castle in Scotland (not), have a B.S. from the University of Leeds (not), that he worked on the wedding cake for Prince Charles and Princess Diana (not), and says he has a five-star diamond award from the American Academy of Hospitality Sciences. The academy is actually an apartment in New York City and anyone can buy a diamond or any other kind of award from it.

Lies, lies, lies. What’s amazing is that Food Network was apparently as ignorant as everyone else about Irvine’s background. They took him at face value and apparently did nothing to check to see if the background of their newest star was anywhere close to what they were told.

Food TV is not renewing “Dinner Impossible,” but will run out the remainder of this season. At least, that’s what they say now. I doubt the dust has settled around this brouhaha. The tabloids haven’t gotten into this fray yet. I fully expect Food TV to ax “Dinner Impossible” completely in the next month.

All in all, Chef Robert ought to have done more reading and less cooking. Mark Twain had some advice for situations like this: “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”

Soup is one of my favorite wintertime meals. I like all kinds, but tend to favor the brothy variety. This year, my search for a good bowl of soup in local restaurants has come up sorely lacking. What I often end up with is a mushy, gloppy cup of overly salty mystery food that in no way resembles what was advertised on the menu. One cup of mystery soup two weeks ago was so thick, it wouldn’t even fall out of the cup into the garbage. I tried to gag down a couple of bites, but it was too salty, a result of having simmered for too long over a hotplate. And God forbid the soup contain any kind of pasta or rice. By the time that concoction has sit for longer than an hour, the grains are so broken down you couldn’t tell a piece of macaroni from a rotini.

I know many restaurants rely on frozen or canned soups from commercial suppliers, but even those who make their own can’t seem to figure out how to make a good pot of soup. (Note to some of the worst offenders, who shall remain nameless: There’s more to making soup than creating a weak broth of water and chicken flavoring, then dumping in all your leftover vegetables from the previous week. The result is a food crime and you ought to be prosecuted.)

The thing is … soup is not rocket science. Any numbskull with a saucepan, aromatics, seasonings and a few tastebuds can make soup. I did it Tuesday night in about an hour (including simmering time). I served my low-fat Chicken Corn Chowder to a friend who proclaimed it “the best soup” he’d ever had. It wasn’t that terrific, but it was savory and hearty, and had the added benefit of being fairly low in sodium because I use lots of spices and little salt. It was also very inexpensive and easy to make, which is something restaurants seem to want. Also, tthis soup could be converted to vegan by substituting vegetable broth for the chicken stock and textured vegetable protein for the chicken. I’m including my recipe, such as it is, since I made it up on the fly and didn’t measure ingredients precisely.

Chicken Corn Chowder

1 to 2 tablespoons olive oil

1 can reduced-sodium chicken stock

1 medium chopped onion

2 stalks chopped celery

2 to 3 cups of water

1 can diced tomatoes

2 cups diced chicken breast

1 can whole kernel corn, drained and rinsed (removes excess sodium)

Garlic powder

Onion powder

Ground cumin

Chili powder

Sour cream (I used the fat-free variety)

Put olive oil in large saucepan and add onions and celery. Cook for a couple of minutes or until onions begin to turn translucent. If you want to use less olive oil, add a little of the chicken stock and cover to let the aromatics release their flavors.

Add remainder of chicken stock and let cook for 5 to 10 minutes or until vegetables become a little more tender. (You could also add other vegetables at this time, such as red or green pepper or chopped cabbage.)

Add water, tomatoes and corn and simmer for 10 minutes or so.

Begin adding the seasonings. This is where the guesswork comes in. I started by covering the top of the soup with a layer of chili powder, followed by the same amount of cumin. Cumin has a rich, smoky flavor that will amp up the volume of any Tex-Mex flavors, so don’t skimp on it. Add about 1 or 2 teaspoons each of garlic and onion powder. Stir and allow soup to simmer for a couple of minutes to allow flavors to mix. Taste. If you’d like more spiciness, add more chili powder and about half as much cumin. Try not to fall back on adding a bunch of salt, although a teaspoon or so probably wouldn’t hurt. Let the soup simmer for a while. Just before serving, stir in about 2 tablespoons of sour cream to give the soup a creamier texture.

I didn’t have any fresh cilantro on hand, but a handful of the freshly chopped herb would be terrific in this, too. Also, if you like a chili-lime flavor combination, this soup could benefit from the addition of a squeeze of lime juice. The acid from the juice would punch up the taste as well. Just slice a whole lime in half and squeeze both halves over the pot and stir. Be careful not to let seeds fall in.

See? Soup isn’t difficult. I wish some restaurant owners could figure that out.