Pi's Pies are generally pretty great, with one, star-costing exception.
Pi Breakfast and Pies, as the name implies, specializes in breakfast food and pies. While the breakfast food is supposedly really good, I focused on the pies.
I was able to try the following pies, in order of my preference:
1. Chocolate and Peanut Butter Pie
2. Crack Pie
3. Orange and Lime Pie
4. Cookie Dough Pie
5. Smores Pie
6. Apple Pie.
It should be pretty obvious from that ranking why I docked Pi a star from my initial 5-star rating. First, let's go over what it did right.
The following pies were excellent:
--Anything with a graham cracker crust. The crusts were dense enough to stand up to the fillings, but still loose enough to give that buttery graham cracker crunch you want.
--Anything with a cream filling. Like the crusts, the cream fillings strike a good balance between being dense enough to give resistance when bitten into, but light enough to melt in your mouth and yield to your fork.
In particular, the fillings I tasted could be described as follows:
1. Chocolate and Peanut butter--like a giant Reese's peanut butter cup. That's my favorite candy of all time so of course I think this is a winner.
2. Crack Pie--I don't know what's in this but it tastes like butter, vanilla, and sugar. How can you go wrong? This one is served slightly warm so it's gooey and sticky and delicious.
3. Orange and Lime--This is starkly different. The tartness of the lime and the freshness that the orange zest provides is refreshing and a good counterpoint to the rich cream base.
4. Cookie Dough Pie--this was alright. It tasted like unbaked chocolate cookie dough, but compared to the others this seemed a little monotone in taste.
5. Smores Pie--the ganache, which featured in the Giant Reese Pie, returns here, but paired with a marshmallow topping. The problem was that the marshmallow topping too closely resembled a jet-puffed marshmallow rather than marshmallow fluff, which would have worked better. Overall, this was still pretty good.
All in all, these 5 pies were just great. I'd have no problems recommending any of them, in particular the first 3.
Now, to the elephant in the room: the Apple Pie.
This was just bad. The crust was bland, floppy, and mushy. The Apples needed more sugar, more cinnamon, and less cheese (yeah there was cheese in it). The filling wasn't gelatinous enough to hold the pie together--look how it kind of fell apart. Overall the pie wasn't sweet enough.
Now, normally, 5 great pies out of 6 would get a 5 for me, with a recommendation not to get the 6th.
HOWEVER, that 6th pie is an Apple Pie, i.e. the first pie that comes to mind, i.e. the benchmarks of pies, i.e. THE pie. To not have a good apple pie at a pie place is like having a bad pepperoni pizza at a pizzeria, or a bad tekka maki at a sushi bar. If you can't get the most basic variant of your main product right, there's something wrong.
Because the apple pie was so bad, I am constrained to give Pi a reluctant 4/5 stars. If on another visit that pie improves I would gladly tack on a 5th. read more