So start a Pie Bar

Artisanal bakers (contemporary ones) have been active and successful at least since Steven and Suzie Sullivan founded The Acme Bread Company in 1983.

And now a new kind of bakery is serving an old-time comfort food.

Pie is having what NPR’s Jean Fain calls a “culinary moment.”

An excerpt from Fain’s excellent essay:

In fact, some home bakers are having … the career-changing dream of transforming … the ultimate comfort food into a profitable, expandable business: the American pie bar, the next, new place where everyone knows your name. Some serve beer and wine; a few, like Seattle’s twin pie bars — Pie Bar Capitol Hill and Pie Bar Ballard — mix craft cocktails. Key Lime Pie-tini, anyone?

The recent proliferation of pie-centric eateries across America is proof that pie bars are having a culinary moment. But instead of mass-produced apple pie and other traditional flavors, this entrepreneurial generation of bakers make pie like mom used to make, but without the Crisco or Cool Whip. With fresh, seasonal ingredients and creative flavor combinations, they’re baking a wide assortment of traditional and innovative pies, like Glennon’s blackberry ginger (a lemony mix of whole berries and crystalized ginger in an all-butter crust) and salted chocolate bites (an ethereal fudge mini-pie in a graham-cracker crust).

The NPR article is here.

Image: Thanks to Four and Twenty Blackbirds.

Thanks to Pamela DeCesare and Craig Swanson for the head’s up.

Grant McCracken