A la mode: Why Brooklyn's Old-Fashioned Pie Shops Can Be Disconcerting

As I wait for the owner of the Blue Stove, the Williamsburg pie shop and café, to come speak with me, I steel myself to hear her say, “Actually, I never made pies until I opened a pie shop. It seemed like the kind of thing that hipsters would like, so I did some research, ordered some memorabilia on eBay, and here we are. I don’t eat pie, myself.”

She doesn't say that at all. Rachel McBride, whose voice and movements are small and flat, has a classic story to go with the establishment that she opened in 2009. Her mother, Glen Martin, always made wonderful pies when Rachel was growing up in upstate New York. Glen had learned to bake from her grandmother, McBride’s great-grandmother, who cooked and baked on a blue woodstove that perched on gray metal feet, like the claws of a bathtub. After her mother died, Rachel decided to open a pie shop in her honor and to use her great-grandmother’s stove as the centerpiece. With its warming drawers above and those peculiar feet, the blue stove seems more like a dressing table than a kitchen appliance, particularly in its current capacity as milk-and-sugar station (and namesake) at the Graham Ave. café.

The Blue Stove has a style summed up by the phrase “home is where the heart is.” Some of the baristas wear bandanas tied floppily around their hair and half aprons with pockets. The mismatched dishes might have come from a church rummage sale. On the blue stove, bottled milk sits in a pail of ice and spoons are stored in those blue-and-white-speckled metal cups I associate with Girl Scout Camp.

The more period detail I notice, the less authentic it feels to me. The hipsters there, with yellow pads and their novels, wearing jeans and plaid shirts or vintage, full-skirted dresses, are stylized in a different way, and I have my doubts about them, too—I doubt that they can really be supporting themselves and sitting in the pie shop.

Less than a jog away, in Greenpoint, is another pie shop, Pie Corps. The color scheme is sky blue. The tables flaunt the woodenness of their planks. There are old-looking pie tins tacked to the walls.

In Gowanus, at Four and Twenty Blackbirds, it’s more wood, curtained windows, a decorative scale suspending a sack of coffee beans above the counter, and baskets, baskets, baskets. Like The Blue Stove, Four and Twenty was also founded by people who inherited their baking talents: sisters from South Dakota whose aunt made pies at a family restaurant back at home. This shop, too, has a story; it’s not Wal-Mart opening a chain of pie shops.

In fact, every shop I visited was unique. So why do they seem so cliché? The feeling is similar to that sense of disappointment when you enter a vintage clothing store and see rack full of nearly identical rabbit-fur vests that you thought were so special when you saw one alone, a hint of white and softness, on a rack of stiff, brown furs in a smaller shop.

I think it’s The Little Prince problem. The little prince’s flower and the fox he tames are special to him, but to the rest of the world, they are unremarkable, no different from any other flower or any other fox. I want to think that my pie shop, The Blue Stove, is “unique au monde,” unique in the world, and it’s not. I visited five different pie shops today, each with a story, each with a claim to uniqueness. But think of them all at once, and The Blue Stove becomes just another pie shop.

That’s New York for you: dry cleaner on every block.

The Little Pie Co., in Manhattan, is the oldest of the pie shops I visited. Founded in 1985 by performing artists looking for side income, it has more tradition, as a store, than the other pie shops, yet is seems the most modern. It has red leather booths, new-looking wooden tables and chairs, standard, plastic and metal napkin dispensers. I feel more comfortable here than at the other pie shops, less afraid that I am being somehow duped.

I think The Little Prince problem is more troubling in the case of pie shops than in the case of, say, dry cleaners because pie shops are meant to be special. At pie shops, everything is just so with roots in family history. I don’t want to know that there are other similar pie shops, but it’s impossible not to. At The Little Pie Co., which is not trying to be ostentatiously unique, there’s less room for disappointment.

In the booth next to me, a group of high-school-aged girls are discussing their favorite musicals. Of course, Phantom of the Opera and Rent, two of my favorites, come up. One of the girls says that she had fallen in love for the first time not with a real boy but with the phantom. Then they start talking about Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), a French operetta-style movie starring Catherine DeNeuve.  When I first saw it, this movie seemed like it was made for me: français, musique; amour. I’d picked it out from the movie offerings at the local library and, eventually, learned the words by heart. And here, by chance, I was sitting next to other people who had loved the same old French movie. Is nothing truly unique?

That’s what irks me about these pie shops. That there are so many of them, each with a story, each so carefully cultivated, assaults one's sense of uniqueness. Of course, we know that our lives are not as unique as they seem. Of course, many young Americans will have watched and loved a given French film. Yet because we only really know about our own lives, they still seem unique. Visiting five pie shops in a day shattered their semblance of originality.

Well—not exactly shattered. I was cynical from the beginning. I knew that pie shops were “a thing.” But I was still disappointed, maybe even more disappointed, when I learned that The Blue Stove had a really nice story—and seemed cliché anyway.

And as I sit here trying to capture that feeling, I have the same sense of foreboding. The fear that my miniature, overwrought existential crisis is no different than anyone else’s, that even if I do capture the feeling, do find unique words to express it, that there are other Ashleys doing the very same thing on their blogs, with their pen names, and that when lined up on a rack in the Goodwill store that is Google, my feeling, my life, will not matter.