This Charming Texas Cafe Is Serving Grandma’s Pie Recipes in the State’s Official Pie Capital

My grandmother kept her rolling pin in a drawer that stuck. I had to jiggle it twice to get it open, and the wood always knocked against the flour tin on the way out.

I can still see her hands, dusted white, pressing a ragged circle of dough into a battered tin plate. She never measured anything. She just knew.

She has been gone a long while now, and for years I assumed that particular taste had gone with her. Then I walked into a little shop in Kyle, Texas, about twenty five miles south of Austin, and got it back in one bite.

The Texas Pie Company sits on the corner of an old downtown square, and the first thing that hits you is butter-scented warmth. Not sugar. Butter. That is the smell of a crust made by hand that morning.

Below, I want to walk you through the whole thing: the pies, the lunch counter almost nobody expects, the woman who built it out of a rolling pin and stubbornness, and the reason this particular small town carries an official title from the Texas Legislature.

A Giant Slice of Cherry Pie Says You Have Arrived

You do not need directions once you are on the right street. Bolted above the awning that shades the sidewalk is an enormous sculpture of a slice of cherry pie, red filling and all, tipped up toward the sky.

It is the kind of roadside landmark people pull over for. I watched a family cross to the little park opposite just so they could line up the shot with the whole slice in frame.

The building itself is low and old and unpretentious, sitting right on the historic square. Inside, the walls carry family photographs going back generations, mixed with odd bits of artwork and baking clutter that clearly accumulated rather than got installed.

You order at a counter. Nobody seats you and nobody hands you a menu, because the case of pies sits at eye level and handles that job by itself.

The tables are close together, and on a weekday at noon you will hear three conversations at once: somebody’s church group, a contractor eating alone, two women splitting a slice and arguing about which one is better.

Twenty Kinds of Pie and One Genuinely Hard Decision

Here is where most people freeze. The pie list runs to roughly twenty varieties, and the classics alone include Southern pecan, lemon chess, buttermilk, almond joy, chocolate fudge, fudge pecan, coconut macaroon and peanut butter mousse.

The fruit side gives you peach, Dutch apple, blueberry, cherry, strawberry peach and strawberry rhubarb. The cream pies are coconut, chocolate and key lime. Pumpkin and pumpkin praline show up when the weather turns.

Sizes are refreshingly simple. A five inch pie, meant for one person and mildly dangerous in that respect, runs $6.50. A full ten inch pie is $30. A slice of cream pie is also $6.50.

Cheesecakes are their own category at $35 for a ten inch, and they want a pre-order. You can get plain, chocolate truffle, Kahlua, strawberry swirl, Oreo, or pumpkin in season.

Underneath all of it is the crust. It is rolled by hand, it shatters when your fork goes in, and it tastes of butter. Plenty of bakeries treat the crust as a container. Here it is the point.

Did you know? The dough recipe is not a company secret invented by a consultant. It came down through a Texas family, generation to generation, and it is still the base for everything in that case.

Buttermilk, Chess, and the Case for Ordering Something Old

My advice, and I will die on this hill: pass over the flavor you can get anywhere and order one of the old Southern ones instead.

Buttermilk pie is a custard, pale gold, set in a flaky shell, sweet but with a tang underneath that keeps it from being cloying. It is also the owner’s own favorite, which tells you something.

Lemon chess is its cousin. Cornmeal in the filling gives it a faint grain and a top that goes slightly crackly in the oven. It is the sort of pie that used to appear at every church supper in the South and now barely appears anywhere.

If you want the crowd pleaser, the Southern pecan is the one. If you want the one people write home about, order the almond joy, which does exactly what the candy bar promises and then keeps going.

The reviews back this up without any help from me. “This is what homemade pie tastes like,” one visitor wrote this past July, and I cannot improve on that sentence.

My own order, every single time, is buttermilk with black coffee. My husband gets the coconut cream and then eats half of mine, which is its own kind of tradition at this point.

Lunch Before Dessert, If You Can Manage It

Most people drive in for pie and are surprised to find a full lunch waiting. This is a real restaurant with a rotating daily plate, and the plate is the reason locals keep the tables full.

The daily special runs $10.25 and arrives with a salad, a homemade yeast roll and freshly brewed iced tea. That is a complete lunch for the price of a sandwich almost anywhere in Austin.

Monday and Tuesday bring King Ranch chicken served over tortilla chips. Wednesday is chicken breast with cranberry citrus gravy and cornbread stuffing. Thursday is meatloaf with garlic mashed potatoes.

Friday and Saturday belong to the five inch individual chicken pot pie, which comes to the table still in its pan, steaming, with a lid of that same hand rolled crust. I have watched people order it in July without hesitation.

There is a soup rotation too: chicken and dumplings early in the week, chicken tortilla midweek, loaded baked potato to close it out. A bowl with crackers is $6.95, or pair it with a half sandwich for $7.95.

Sandwiches are $7.75 and old fashioned in the best way. Chicken salad, tuna salad, egg salad, pimento cheese, turkey Swiss, ham and cheddar, BLT. Grilled cheese and peanut butter and jelly are $4.50 and aimed squarely at kids.

The salads have names worth reading. The Julie-Ann and the Big Country are both $9.95, the chef salad is $8.95, and a quiche salad plate is $9.75.

You can also walk out with dinner. Casseroles come ready to heat in two sizes, $25 for four servings and $32 for eight, and the lineup covers chicken pot pie, King Ranch chicken, chicken tetrazzini, three cheese lasagna and beef stroganoff.

Quiches run $30 for a ten inch. Spinach mushroom, ham and cheddar, Italian tomato, quiche Lorraine, or whatever the chef decides that week.

Pro tip: if you are feeding a crowd, the casserole plus a full pie is a whole Sunday dinner you did not cook, and nobody at your table has to know that.

From a Rolling Pin to a Storefront on the Square

The Texas Pie Company was founded by Julie Albertson, and the origin story is exactly as homespun as the pie suggests.

She learned on her grandmother’s farm in East Texas as a small child. In her own telling, she was “standing on soup cans so I could reach the counter.” Those are the recipes still in use.

Her first bakery opened in 1986. She had lost a job, needed holiday money, and started selling handmade pies door to door at office parks because that was the fastest way to turn flour into rent.

Then she got in the car with a rolling pin and a list. She drove pies to restaurants around Austin and the Hill Country and asked them to taste. Roughly thirty of them became standing accounts, buying from her every other week.

The Texas Pie Company name went up in 1988, still out of a small kitchen, still rolling every crust by hand. For two decades she was a wholesale baker whose customers ate her work without ever knowing her name.

In 2000 she opened the storefront in downtown Kyle. That is the shop you walk into today. It turned a quiet supply operation into somewhere people drive an hour to reach on a Saturday.

Today the operation sits under Julie’s Pies of Texas, which also covers a plant nursery called Moongate Mercantile and the dough business. She has catered events for up to a thousand guests, worked the festival circuit, and shipped pies well beyond the state line.

When the world shut down in 2020, she pivoted to grocery delivery and had her team sewing handmade masks, which kept eighteen people on payroll through a year that closed a lot of small kitchens for good.

The Frozen Puck That Won $25,000

In 2016 the wholesale baker from Kyle ended up on a stage in Houston, holding a novelty check.

Julie developed something she calls the Original Pie Dough Puck: a disc of frozen, raw, handmade pie dough that you thaw and roll out yourself for anything sweet or savory. It is her crust, sold to people who want the crust without the technique.

In 2016 she entered it in H-E-B’s Quest for Texas Best contest. Nearly five hundred Texas products applied. Twenty five finalists went to Houston to present.

She won the grand prize: a $25,000 check and a contract putting the product on H-E-B shelves across the state. As she put it, she took flour, butter, shortening and determination and turned it into something magical.

I find that genuinely moving. A woman who started by knocking on office doors with pies in the back seat ended up with her grandmother’s crust in the freezer aisle of the biggest grocery chain in Texas.

How a Small Town Became the Official Pie Capital of Texas

Kyle did not stumble into its pie identity. It chose it, then went and got it in writing.

On June 16, 2021, the 87th Texas Legislature enrolled Senate Concurrent Resolution 22, authored by Senator Donna Campbell, naming Kyle the official Pie Capital of Texas. The designation runs for ten years.

The resolution names this shop specifically. It notes that over more than two decades the business grew from selling a few pies a day to as many as three hundred, with about three quarters of those going to people from out of town.

The city built a whole civic personality on top of that. January 23 is proclaimed Pie Day. March 14 is celebrated as Pi Day, because of course it is. Kyle joined the American Pie Council and took out trademark protection on the title.

More than forty local businesses have signed on to a program called CertiPIEd, which asks them to work pie into what they do. A bank, a hotel and a real estate office are all in on it.

Since 2017 the town has hosted the Pie in the Sky Hot Air Balloon Festival over Labor Day weekend, with balloons going up at dawn and a pie eating contest that gets appropriately messy.

The city had something to build on because one stubborn baker on Center Street had already spent twenty years proving people would drive there for pie.

What Else Is Waiting on This Street

Do not eat and run. The block you are standing on is older than almost anything around it.

Kyle was founded in 1880 by David E. Moore and Fergus Kyle, who gave up land so the International-Great Northern Railroad would put a station between Austin and San Marcos. Town lots were auctioned that October under a live oak on Sledge Street.

The public square across from the pie shop was drawn into that original 1880 plat. It once hosted traveling shows, musicals and chautauquas, which were touring lecture programs that brought big ideas to small towns.

Walk a little further down the same street and you reach the childhood home of Katherine Anne Porter, one of the great American short story writers, who lived there from 1892 to 1901. It was named a National Literary Landmark on June 13, 2002.

So you can have a slice of buttermilk pie and then stand in the yard where a future Pulitzer winner grew up, all inside about four hundred steps. That is a very good afternoon.

What to Know Before Your First Visit

Go hungry and go early. The lunch plates are made in limited quantity and the day’s special can run out before the afternoon does.

Doors open at 10:30 in the morning. Weekdays run until 6:30 in the evening and Saturday closes at 4:00. Sunday hours have shifted over the years, and holidays move everything around, so one quick phone call saves a wasted drive.

If you want a full ten inch pie for a specific day, call ahead. Same for cheesecake, which is pre-order only. Holiday weeks in particular are booked out further than you would guess.

The five inch pies are the smartest thing on the menu for travelers. Buy three different flavors, eat them over the next two days, and you have effectively run your own tasting.

Bring cash or card, bring a cooler if you are driving any distance, and give yourself permission to buy a casserole on the way out. Everybody does.

Parking is street parking around the square, and it is free and generally easy outside the lunch rush.

How to Get There

Where: Texas Pie Company, 202 W. Center St., Kyle, TX 78640. Phone: (512) 268-5885.

Kyle sits directly on Interstate 35 between Austin and San Marcos, which makes this one of the easiest detours in Central Texas. From downtown Austin you are looking at roughly half an hour without traffic.

Coming from San Antonio, it is about an hour north, and it slots in perfectly as a stop on the way to Austin rather than a trip of its own.

Once you exit the interstate, the downtown square is a short drive west, and the giant slice of pie on the roof does the rest of the navigating for you.

Save Room and Point the Car South

This place has never advertised much and has never chased a trend. It has spent forty years doing one thing carefully, which in the restaurant business counts as an act of nerve.

Good pie exists in plenty of cities. A pie built on somebody’s grandmother’s recipe, rolled out by hand that same morning, in a town that liked it enough to get the title written into state law, is a rarer thing.

So pick a weekday, drive down, order the buttermilk, and take a whole one home for whoever is waiting. Then tell them where you got it, because that is how a place like this stays open another forty years.

Featured image: Austin Refrigeration And Air Conditioning via Texas Pie Company