A well-known American restaurant chain. The name is short for International House of Pancakes, and you say it as a word, not letter by letter: 'EYE-hop'. It is a sit-down family restaurant, not fast food — you sit in a booth, a server comes over, and coffee gets refilled again and again. Pancakes and waffles and big breakfast plates are the main thing, and the key point for learners is that Americans eat breakfast food there at any hour: many branches are open late or all night, so IHOP is where students go after a night out and where families go on Sunday morning. It also serves burgers and dinner food, but nobody thinks of it that way. In American speech it works like any place name — 'let's go to IHOP', 'we met at IHOP' — usually with no 'the'. It carries a mild feeling of cheap, ordinary, comforting, slightly uncool, which is why it shows up as a joke in American TV and films. There are no branches in Taiwan, so for students it is mostly a word you MEET rather than use — in a sitcom, in a song, in a friend's photo.