Is Pie the New Cupcake?

Because I am a food critic, I receive regular and high-level counsel from sources not accessible to mere mortals: precious data about the wants and needs of the dining public, the desirous howls of the vox populi, distilled into pronouncements. Sushi is waning. Fusion is over. Comfort food is back.

Joshua Huston

High 5's pies are great—in a display case.

Location Info

Map

High 5 Pie

1400 12th Ave.
Seattle, WA 98122

Category: Restaurant > Bakeries

Region: Capitol Hill

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Pie

3515 Fremont Ave. N.
Seattle, WA 98103

Category: Restaurant > Bakeries

Region: Fremont

Details

High 5 Pie 1400 12th Ave., 695-2284, high5pie.com. 6 a.m.–10 p.m. Mon.–Fri., 7 a.m.–10 p.m. Sat.–Sun. Pie 3515 Fremont Ave. N., Suite B, 436-8590, sweetandsavorypie.com. 8 a.m.–7 p.m. Tues.–Thurs.; 8 a.m.–7 p.m. and 9 p.m.–2 a.m. Fri.–Sat.; 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Sun.

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More About

• Dani Cone
• Bobby Flay
• Madison
• Pies and Tarts
• Pastry

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These masters of marketing, these mages of demography and focus groups—the walls of their workshops plastered thickly with charts and graphs, desks a-scatter with spreadsheets and audience-response data—are wizards. They know you better than you know yourselves. Scrying the warp of potentiality, they know what will be hot and what will not. Using nothing more than a cracked bowl, the bones of a confit duck, and Bobby Flay's tears, they can see the future. And at the dawning of the new year, all signs pointed in a single direction, so that when we critics went to palaver with the warlocks, we bent close, felt their curdled breath tickling our ears, and heard their whispered proclamation.

Pie is the new cupcake.

It was an exciting time. The iron-fisted rule of the cupcake bakers was coming to an end. A new era was dawning in the food world, a new king was being crowned. Pie! Of course it was pie! How could we all have been so blind?

I was particularly happy with this announcement because I have long suffered under the tyranny of cupcakes, just as I did under the flourless chocolate torte and the chocolate lava cake before them. I also knew there were pie bakeries in Seattle already up and running, getting a jump on this new trend and serving pies to the revolutionary masses. What could be more delicious, more comforting, more fresh and new than pie? What better food to knock the damnable cupcake from its frosted throne? Pie was going to save us all.

Dani Cone, owner of Fuel Coffee, was obviously also in on some of these musings about the resurgence of pie. And according to the creation timeline of her new Capitol Hill pie shop, High 5 Pie, she either got her information early or made one very lucky guess. She was already working on bringing a pie shop to life back in 2009. That was when she first started trying to attract investors to her concept, and by December 2010 she had the place up and running in a large, bright, high-ceilinged space on the corner of 12th and Madison.

High 5 has everything you'd expect from a pie shop owned by a coffee entrepreneur trying to ride the zeitgeist. There are plenty of hot drinks on the board, big windows looking out onto the neighborhood (and the Ferrari dealership across the street), a long counter full of bakery cases to display the goods, cafe-style seating for about 20, and of course pies. Pies in glorious variety. Pies in all shapes and sizes. There are full-size pies and smaller pies, petite pies good for just a couple of bites, Cutie Pies baked in muffin tins, pies made in Mason jars, and hand pies—staples of Southern pie-making history, of depressions and poverty, the pride of scratch-cooks and leftover-utilizers everywhere. High 5 caters as well, offering pie pops (tiny little pies on a stick), slab pies, and huge pies that will serve 40. There are fruit pies and cream pies, a few savory pies, and a board of specials that changes day-to-day, season-by-season.

But the one thing all these pies have in common? They are all terrible, with blunt, dull crusts that taste like chewing damp cardboard and fillings that are either overwhelmingly nasty or almost impossibly flavorless, with no sweet middle ground.

I was honestly stunned the first time I tasted High 5's offerings, thinking that I must've been the one doing something wrong—showing up on a bad day, at a bad hour, ordering poorly, or worse. I simply could not believe how disappointing the product was. There were marionberry pies in the case that had bubbled during baking, oozing out their filling around the edges of the uneven crust and scorching to an ugly purply-black. I had a wild-berry Cutie Pie that had almost no fruit flavor at all and a crumble topping with a texture like eating a mouthful of sawdust, barely spiced with cinnamon. And the savory(ish) apple, cheddar, and rosemary hand pie that I walked out the door with was borderline offensive—the apples reasonably made, but then ruined by the tarry pine flavor of whole rosemary needles (so much fun to chew!) and a clotted-up gob of shredded cheddar, barely melted and settled in a ball in the middle of the thing like a prize buried at the bottom of a shit sundae.

I had to go back. I had no choice. No actual customer in their right mind ever would have, but I had to understand how someone could start a pie shop and keep it running without even a vague understanding of how to bake a pie. Cone gives all the credit for her recipes and their inspiration to her grandmother Molly, an apparent whiz with an all-butter crust, but this was just laughable. Even if I'd never tasted a properly-done pie before in my life, I would've known these were bad. It was as if no one in the shop had ever tasted one of their own creations.