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From pies to . . . pies
BY ANDY KING
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There aren’t a whole lot of places to get cakes and pies in Portland. That’s funny, considering how darn quaint our state is. So, having heard "do you serve pie?" at the Standard Baking Company one to many times, Portland restaurateur and wealthy gadabout Dana Street (not to mention one of the sexiest men in Portland, according to this paper), along with Standard’s owners, Matt James and Alison Pray, and Una Chef Kristen DuShane, decided to do something about it. Having mastered European and crusty at the bakery for going on 10 years, they’re turning their collective eye towards American and homey. The result? A classic bakery called Two Fat Cats. It’s not the first example of a Street et al collaboration tackling a subject steeped in local Americana. There’s Scales, the clam-shack in the Portland Public Market headed up by Sam Hayward, and before that, there was the pizza joint American Pie on outer Forest. So trying to take on another facet of your childhood memory — that being grandma’s famous fruit pie or deep, dark, and delicious chocolate cake — should be (I should be fired for this) a piece of cake. But those folks aren’t taking anything for granted. Idea meetings and cake tastings are attended by what has become a brain trust for successful Portland fooderies, the chefs and owners of all of the Street-associated businesses. Input is elicited from not only chefs and owners, but bakers, cooks, and whomever else might be in range of the bowl of frosting. And turning Portland Pie’s old space on India Street (see this week’s "Dinner and a Movie") into a cheery bakery will require a lot of sugary energy. We’re looking forward to stealing something off the cooling window.
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