Tulsa Pie Festival
WOMPA
October 3, 2026
Pie people have good time management, which explains why I snagged the last parking space in the WOMPA lot at October 3’s inaugural Tulsa Pie Festival, hosted by Common Tart, at 11 a.m., the exact time the festival opened. The first of its kind in Tulsa, the three-part event included pie sales from Common Tart, local food and arts vendors, and a home baker competition that up to 100 festival attendees could help judge for an admission upcharge.
I’ll get my few quibbles out of the way here, as they are all organizational. I had to ask at check-in what my wristbands meant and what the tokens they handed me were for (they were for placing in cups next to my three favorite pies). There was no one-way route through the 22ish pie tasting entrants, so the line split into two directions and caused a pi(e)le-up about midway.
A couple of competition bakers told me that general admission attendees—that is, patrons who didn’t pay for competition wristbands—helped themselves to tastings and threw off the quantity of pie they had to prepare. These are small complaints for a first-time event with no way to predict how many people might show up and how punctual they would all be (very).
Pie people are patient, though, so none of these things detracted much from the experience as an attendee and taster. The in-line chatting between strangers was fun and pleasant while we waited to get into the tasting hall, all of us crunching on provided Lay’s potato chips and strips of bacon handed out as palate cleansers.
I’m not sure how much I care about pie on an average day, but this doesn’t stop me and shouldn’t stop anyone from enjoying a recreational activity dedicated to it. My parents took us to the Poteet Strawberry Festival in Texas in the early 1990s. In 2024 I went to a Korean village dedicated to cheese. Maybe next year I’ll hit up Oklahoma’s rival Porter and Stratford Peach Festivals and choose a side.
Even without the pie fervor lots of other people seemed to have, I was heartened by this gathering of families and friends allowing themselves to be excited about something a little silly and a little special. I talked briefly to a group of people wearing matching Pie or Die 918 shirts and handing out stickers and shots of Fireball as gifts to their favorite bakers.
L: Spicy S'mores Pie. R: Dressed in Silk. | photos by Becky Carman
As a short crust pleb, I was so impressed by the skill of some of the competition entrants, who posted their recipes at their tasting stations for perusal. This is how I found out I’m maybe a shortening person and not a butter person, which is sacrilege according to the elderly pie lady experts in line next to me. I’m not sure how to feel about myself anymore.
L: Berry Chai Latte Pie. R: Peanut Butter Maple Bacon Pie. | photos by Becky Carman
The outdoor vendor area included ice cream (logical) and Andolini’s Pizzeria (different pie) as well as tables set up by local potters and other artists and craftspeople. I can’t see any metric by which the first Tulsa Pie Festival wouldn’t be considered a success, and I’ll let the competition results speak for themselves and not for me, since none of my selections received awards—shoutout to #11 Blubarb and #1 Brown Butter Pecan Chai. You were robbed. Or maybe I’m not quite enough of a pie person yet. Maybe next year.
