Daily news blog for Seattle's Queen Anne neighborhood

 

Two days, 2,500 pies

November 28th, 2009 · 9 Comments

When Alyssa Lewis and her husband Patrick opened the Seattle Pie Company in Magnolia in mid-July, they had no idea it would take off the way it has in just a few short months.

Alyssa Lewis & Patrick, Seattle Pie Company

By August Seattle Weekly had renamed the neighborhood “Pie City.” By November the new neighborhood business struck a big deal with Metropolitan Market, providing pies for their six Seattle-area locations. And now they’re so busy, they’re expanding into a 1,000 square foot retail space next door to accommodate their fast-growing success. In four months they went from baking an estimated 30 pies a day, to a few hundred.

Seattle Pie Company

So when Thanksgiving rolled around, the folks at Seattle Pie Company knew they were in for some late nights. In fact, Alyssa, Patrick, and a rotation of employees and family members (Patrick’s older brother Darren came from Port Orchard to help with the holiday rush), spent the days leading up to Thanksgiving baking pies. All night long.

Seattle Pie Company

At 10 a.m. on Thanksgiving morning, Thursday, November 26, the crew was still hard at work filling all the holiday pie orders. “We’ve been here all night the last two nights,” Patrick said. “We’re like Navy seals.” And in 48 hours, the little pie company that could baked over 2,000 personal pie orders and 500 for the Metropolitan Markets.

Seattle Pie Company

Stacked to one side of the shop, against the windows, were boxes neatly arranged and labeled with various pies – pecan, cherry, strawberry rhubarb, marionberry, banana creme, chocolate creme, apple crumb, apple marionberry crumb, and of course, pumpkin. Every few minutes another pie-buyer would walk in and happily collect their order.

Seattle Pie Company

And beyond filling the thousands of orders they had, the Seattle Pie Company also made a couple hundred extra pumpkin pies for the last minute emergency customers. And even those flew off the shelves fast. Around 10:30 a woman walked in with her daughter, looking for an extra pumpkin pie (theirs had met a tragic end in their kitchen), taking home one of the last available.

Seattle Pie Company

“We tell people to come back at noon in case a couple people don’t pick theirs up,” Patrick said. And after two days of hard work, the crew at the Seattle Pie Company packed up around 12 p.m. on Thanksgiving, and went home to enjoy their own holiday celebrations – catching up on some much-deserved sleep and ordering Chinese food. “If I learned one thing, it’s that people love pie,” Darren said. “Make pie and they will come.”

KING5 joined the Alyssa, Patrick and their crew on Wednesday morning. You can watch their coverage of the well-buttered pie making machine here.



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