His artful pancakes feed a need and awe audiences

Second of two parts.

Lee Goldberg had never heard of pancake art, but he studied pictures and videos online, awed by the intricacy.

He tried it, using a coffee filter as a piping bag. “Those pancakes were terrible,” he said, “but it was the most fun I’d had in a long time.”

Jorge Lomas, the food services director for Crossroads’ seven treatment centers, encouraged Lee to keep practicing.

Lee had completed treatment for a drug addiction and was looking for something to fill the hours when he might otherwise have faltered.

Lee experimented with batters, colors and squeeze bottles. Soon, his portraits looked like people. He turned out pancake puppies, cartoon characters and monsters.

In the kitchen at Crossroads one day, he set out a half-dozen squeeze bottles filled with batter. He worked quickly, outlining in one color, shading with another, creating shadows with a third.

When he flipped it over, using a wide spackling knife instead of a spatula, it was a monster from the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons.

The pancakes don’t turn out perfectly every time. “It’s a pancake,” he said. “Mistakes are delicious.”

Four years ago, professional pancake artists Don Drake and Hank Gustafson of Dancakes took him on as an apprentice. Now he travels the world, making pancakes at events and private parties, and every Sunday at brunch at Copper Blues Live in Phoenix.

Often people say, “I can’t eat this.” He asks, “Did you enjoy watching me make it? Did you enjoy the flip? Did you take plenty of pictures? Eat it. It’s a pancake.”

These pancakes feed him in a different way.

He’s good at this. He can’t remember being good at anything before.

Lee likes being in the Crossroads’ kitchen, where he turned his life around. He leans across the counter and tells new residents, “Hang in there. It does get better.”

He’s proof of that.