Edith’s Pie
412 22nd St.
Oakland
Pie for lunch?
Why yes! Why not?
Edith’s Pie now offers that option from a sweet storefront in downtown Oakland. You’ve perhaps already been past and missed it. Welcoming and bright, with happy plants and lots of art, it is at a strange intersection with a small pedestrian plaza, but tucked away, invisible until you look.
Started as a pop-up in late 2019, they’ve kept that DIY energy and quirkiness, frequenting farmer’s markets every couple of days for fresh produce for their weekly-changing menu items and offering local coffee and cooled beverages as well as in-house hot sauce near the register.
Our eyes huge in anticipation, my friend and I ordered an item from each category to ensure we got as complete an introductory experience as possible. This meant one slice of quiche, one meat and one vegetarian savory hand pie, a small salad, and two slices of sweets, one of each crust style — butter, like the savory choices, and graham.
Let’s get the few bites of freshness out of the way before delving into the buttery stuff: the salad (side, $4) was a tiny treat of crispness. If we’d chosen fewer pies I would happily have eaten twice as much of it. The watery little gem leaves are a great choice to offset endless plates of pie. Not groundbreaking, but doesn’t need to be. It only needs to convince me that the veggies are cared for, and they are.
The three savory choices all came with a side of a lovely green herb sauce I liked very much. Its flavor was too powerful for my delicately filled cheese and spinach hand pie, but a lovely companion to the weightier slice of potato, rosemary, and garlic quiche.
The spinach and goat cheese was delightful and familiar, the spinach tasting hearty and much like spanakopita, the cheese soft, fluffy, coming together for something almost dainty. The spiced lamb and date was “really really good” with “bold flavor,” the ground meat full bodied, the spice just right. All three had butter crusts, intricately flaky, baked to perfection. I would go saltier, but perhaps that’s just me.
These butter crusts were described to us as croissant-like in the chocolate chess number. Though we’d opted for the World Famous Scribble, I would agree — browned and flaky as all get out, tasting bready and richly toasty. Not sweet, almost yeasty and deeply fatty but not coating, just great. But between the sweets, the graham was the winner: It too was a gorgeous golden brown, densely packed and finely crushed, with a perfect level of sugar and just enough salt for my persistent salt tooth, the sandy texture melting and morphing inside your mouth. Outstanding.
Much as we wanted to love it, the scribble pie was hard to eat and overall not a favorite, though we got darn close to finishing it. The contrasting textures repelled our forks, the whole nuts, a nice tough in theory, near impossible to spear, perhaps harder to scoop in practice. The chocolate’s uneven design left some spots bare and others too covered making up much of a bite. The base crust was difficult to cut, thin and stretchy, while the side edges, crimped and puffy, stood at odds. The bottom layer of filling was creamy and nicely flavored but too gelatinous for my taste, coating and lingering on the tongue.
As a pecan pie lover, I think I’ll stay that route, but also don’t mean to make it out as though this was a bad pie —simply not their finest work that day and not the right slice for me. Particularly when in the presence of greatness.
So back to the Really Really Good Stuff. The Key Lime soared above its delicious brethren, delivering the signature punch of acid followed by just the right amount of sweet. The whipped cream was thick, smooth, downright luscious, as thick as the lime below it. A simple and (I have no clue of their process, but traditionally) unbelievably easy recipe that nearly always turns out good results, this version is transcendent. Like, five plates of pie deep and only then exclaiming loudly how great it was.
We’d thought we had ordered far more than we could handle, but it turned out with pies this good, five plates is, in fact, just right. I can’t wait to return for the cauliflower hand pie and, we’ll have to assume, another slice of the key lime.
Edith’s Pie is open Tuesday — Thursday 7:30 a.m.-6 p.m. and Friday & Saturday 7:30 a.m.-8 p.m.
