5 Best Apple Pies In New York City
The great thing about apple pie, besides the fact that it tastes amazing and reminds us of grandmothers and falling leaves and new tweed blazers, is that it offers you a baseline: you can really judge a bakery's capabilities by how much love and care they put into each slice. Here are our picks for the city's best. Grab a fork and some elastic-waist pants. By Jessica Allen.
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This Brooklyn restaurant boasts all kinds of pie, from mocha pudding to sour cherry to raspberry nectarine to peach to key lime, lemon lavender chess, and chocolate mousse. And apple. A good, old-fashioned apple pie takes any day from meh to good or from good to great. Everything at The Blue Stove is made from scratch each day in small batches, using seasonal ingredients. (The bakery's name comes from an actual blue stove that now serves as a condiment station.)
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After a childhood spent on a farm in Hecla, South Dakota, near where their family owned a restaurant, sisters Melissa and Emily Elsen made their way to Brooklyn, eventually opening the extraordinary pie shop known as Four and Twenty Blackbirds. And, just like their grandmother who baked for the family restaurant, they make all their pies from scratch each and every day. While many delicious slices are always on hand, you should try the salted caramel apple. It will blow your mind!
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Why are so many great pie shops located in Brooklyn? We're not sure, but we think we need to do some more research to figure it out. Like a lot of research, starting with the savory and sweet, small batch pies made at Pie Corps. Savory and sweet pies mean you can have pie for your entry AND your dessert, in such combos as chicken pot pie followed by lemon basil custard, or curried potato and pea chased with the bakery's signature apple crumb with raspberry caramel. Try the pie pops (just what they sound like) too!
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The motto at Pies 'n' Thighs? "[E]verything's special." And by "everything," they mean the Southern-inflected slow food for which the Williamsburg restaurant has become famous, and for which the crowds gather daily. After gorging yourself on chicken and waffles, biscuits and gravy, and/or a fried catfish sandwich, with a big side of hush puppies or cheese grits, along with a tall glass of sweet tea, finish up with a slice of apple pie. Note: it's just as good at the second location on the Lower East Side.
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Consistently recognized as a purveyor of one of the city's best cheesecakes (no mean feat considering NYC is cheesecake central), Two Little Red Hens, on the Upper East Side, also makes a mean apple pie and lemon tart and peach raspberry muffin and chocolate banana cream pie and Brooklyn blackout cake (with four layers of chocolate cake and three layers of chocolate pudding filling!) and very berry cake and honey cake and ginger plum cherry pie and and and . . . you get the point. Worth every single calorie, for sure.
