Area Daily: Pie Bakery & Café, Boston, MA

"We weren’t trying to be cool. We’re just making what we like,” says Ellen Kaplansky, owner of Pie Bakery & Café, explaining the rationale behind her new venture in Newton Center in Boston. Kaplansky and executive pastry chef Paige Retus love pie and wanted to share their passion, fashioning dough-encased delicacies for breakfast, lunch, dinner and, of course, dessert.

“Almost every culture has something enclosed you could call a pie,” explains Retus, a Culinary Institute of America graduate and accomplished pastry chef, but “there’s no place to go for just pie.” So the two friends set out to change that.

Their bakery-café serves savory, as well as sweet pies, along with sandwiches, soups, take-out dinner fare, and breakfast and dessert pastries. Signature offerings include roasted chicken and apple compote pastie, a closed, hand-held pie inspired by the British tradition of baking a savory filling at one end and sweet at the other – a whole meal in a pie; and egg pie, which is Retus’ version of French quiche. There are 15 standard flavors of dessert pie (subject to seasonal availability), but Retus says her apple pies – each of which houses two-and-a-half to three pounds of apples – fly out the door.

Our vote: the Boston Cream Pie cupcake is pretty impressive.

Read more about Pie Bakery & Cafe on Misstropolis, the online magazine for modern women.