I’ll Have My Pie and a Drink, Too

For seven years, Laurie Gray and her team of bakers have focused on bringing one thing to the Long Beach community: pie. 

With a focus on community ties, Gray and her team hope to bring tasty pies and smiles to all those who need a nice dessert in their life.

Freshness is the main focus of employees when creating their sweet treats. With that comes the timely dedication of creating each pie by hand, which includes prep work.

“We have to make sure all the fruit is ready to fill, all the dust, like the sugar, the spices and everything is ready and our dough is, like, ready rolled out,” said Tracy Adame, head baker at The Pie Bar.

It takes one hour to bake just one pie at The Pie Bar—an hour and a half if all of the prep work needs to be done. 

Even when baking multiple different fruit pies at the same time and temperature, the cool down of each pie takes up to three hours.

“When it bakes, it makes this like, syrupy, molasses-y filling. You can't just cut it because it just oozes out and it just [goes] everywhere,” Adame said. “You have to wait for it to cool so when you slice, you get that nice, firm slice.”

Head baker Tracy Adame begins to way out dough balls that would be used for the next batches of pies at The Pie Bar. Photo by Nicholas Broadhead.

For three years, Adame has headed this process. Even though it can be stressful to get all the work done, especially during the holiday season, she loves what she does.

“I love the reaction of giving somebody a dessert, having them just love it and just being so happy because food makes people happy in one way or another,” Adame said. 

This kind of love is something Gray, owner and founder of The Pie Bar, takes pride in and hopes all will feel when biting into each slice of pie. 

“We have a lot of regulars that we see all the time and they do become like family over the years,” Gray said. “You can have a great product, but I think what really keeps people coming back to a business is how you make them feel.”

Gray first got into the baking industry after getting laid off from her corporate marketing job in 2014. With Thanksgiving approaching, Gray decided to bake pies out of her single oven at home and sell them.

“I printed some business cards, I created a website and then I just started marketing, which is what I'm good at being an ex-marketing manager,” Gray said. “Word caught on and started to spread and the orders started really coming in, so much that I was baking like 16-hours-a-day.”

The Pie Bar owner and founder, Laurie Gray, works on business in far right corner of the shop. Gray is currently focusing on franchising her business not just in California, but in neighboring states in the U.S. Photo by Nicholas Broadhead.

After doing pop-up shops, The Pie Bar was officially established in 2016, with lines going down the street just for a piece of the pie on opening day. 

“We kept running out of pies, so we had to just keep making and making and making, and I would have to leave and run to the grocery store to get more creams and make whipped cream and so it just— we couldn't keep up in those first early days as we were learning,” Gray said. 

But Gray didn’t want to limit herself to just selling pies. When first establishing her business, she knew that she wanted to add alcohol into the mix.

“I wanted a place where people could come, like in the evening or after work and have a beer and a piece of pie or come with friends and have a bottle of wine and share some pie,” Gray said. 

As with many restaurants and food businesses, a main menu was established for the bar. As the years went by, Gray would continue to consider adding different flavors of pie to the core menu.

“I'm not an apple pie person. Like, it's probably never going to be my first, second, third, fourth, fifth choice of pie to order,” Gray said. “Then after the first couple months, just so many requests that then, we created an apple pie, a Dutch apple pie. And so now, it's one of our top sellers.”

This variety of flavors come with their own texture and flavor profiles, making so many opportunities to have a unique experience. 

If you want to have a classic pie experience, the Dutch apple pie has a really strong and chewy filling, with fresh apples inside. Rather than let the filling dominate, the cinnamon sugar crumble brings a nice crunch to it, evening out the texture. 

Ask nicely, and a scoop of vanilla ice cream will be added to your slice. The creamy and melty flavor adds another layer of sweetness to the mix, but doesn’t overpower the taste.

The Mississippi mud pie is one of the cold pies that The Pie Bar has to offer. With a focus on chocolate, the pie cuts easy with a fork due to soft texture of its chocolate pudding and layer of whipped cream. Photo by Nicholas Broadhead.

The Mississippi mud pie is the go to pie for all chocolate lovers. The sweet dark chocolate pudding and layer of whipped cream gives a rich and creamy taste in your mouth. With its chocolate gram cracker crust, it keeps the pie from being liquidy and has a nice texture when biting into it.

The Pie Bar also brings unique combinations for customers to try, such as the ube coconut cheesecake pie. 

When first biting into the slice, you are instantly blown away with the traditional cheesecake flavor, a rich and sweet taste that has a bit of tang as well. To keep the sweetness from overwhelming you, ube brings it down, making you want to keep eating and have that rush of sweetness all over again. 

Used to serve their Cutie Pies, mason jars have become an iconic part of the shop . 

Just like with a traditional pie, Cutie Pies have fillings, crusts and whipped creams, but are put into one small mason jar, allowing customers to take their pies on the go more easily.

There is no limit on creativity when it comes to serving up pie, as each season brings in a rotation of different pie flavors. Employees are able to pitch ideas to Gray in hopes of bringing new tastes to customers.

“The crème brûlée pie, which is actually on the menu permanently, was a pie [that] took me a year to get it right,” Adame said. “We brought it in for Labor Day last year, and people just fell in love with it.” 

New customers continue to fall in love with the shop as it grabs the attention of nonlocals based on what they offer.

Terry and Leo, who were visiting from Buena Park, just happened to google pie places close to where they were staying in Long Beach and found The Pie Bar.

“Everything is displayed nicely. It's just, it’s got a nice energy to it,” Leo said.

“And they're open past seven,” Terry added. 

Regulars are also part of the reason why the shop continues to have success. 

Rachi Meera and Mohammed Noah have been going for the past six and seven years and have enjoyed not only the pie that they eat, but also the atmosphere it brings to Long Beach.

Cars continue to go down Pine Avenue right next to The Pie Bars outside seating. Owner and founder Laurie Gray says that the business starts getting more busy around 7 p.m. when people are off work. Photo by Nicholas Broadhead.

“You see places around here, especially on Pine [Avenue], come and go. This has been a staple in this area for a while now, so it's just nice,” Noah said. “It feels like they put time and effort to make this area nice, add sweetness to [it], a nice place for like families to come, couples, people in general.”

Both Gray and Adame have felt the warmth of the Long Beach community, as many customers continue to buy their baked goods and even become a part of their lives. 

“There was a story of a customer last year. He messaged Laurie saying that he and his wife loved one of the pies. I guess she had recently passed and that he bought the pie,” Adame said. “The memory’s there for him, of him and his wife eating the pie. Things like that, it's just so heartwarming that you're able to keep something familiar to them.”

The Pie Bar continues to have success in Long Beach, but soon hopes to expand their name and brand through franchising. 

“When I started it, I had to figure everything out from the ground up. So now I have a great business model that can be duplicated anywhere and I'm excited to help other people achieve their dreams of owning a small business,” Gray said.

With the holiday season coming, there is a lot of work for Gray and the team to accomplish.

“It would be really hard to go back to corporate America and work for somebody else again,” Gray said. 

“Even with all the challenges and frustrations that go along with running a business, it really has brought me so much joy, and I think it's partly because of what we do and the product we have. It brings comfort to people. It reminds people of home and happy memories and I really enjoy being a part of that.”