Elizabeth’s Pick: Pie is the New Cupcake

Last month The Wall Street Journal predicted pie as the new cupcake for 2011 (it’s also the year of the vegetable, but would you have read a blog by that title?). This classic dessert is apparently poised to take over the comfort food market, from hand-held pies to pie shops. Since then, I’ve been wracking my brain for the last time I ate pie that wasn’t baked by one of the matriarchs of my family (you’d be hard-pressed to find a more perfectly caramelized pecan or fresh apple). I came up with plenty of tarts (Alma’s delicately sweet pecan with maple-glazed raisins) and panna cottas (Dakota’s Meyer lemon with pink peppercorn), plus the requisite and gargantuan key lime pies at Manny’s and Oceanaire, but nothing that resembled an all-American, lard-crusted, oven-fresh, ala mode piece of PIE. I know you can order them whole, from Turtle Bread and Lucia’s To-Go, but I’m curious whether you’ve been partaking in pie at any restaurants? What slices have I been missing out on? And who, pray tell, is going to open the Cities’ first pie shop? Consider the gauntlet thrown down.