American Pie

Desserts are fashion-conscious, too. Tiramisu and crème brûlée may be hot today, but they'll become less sexy -- like the once-hot flourless chocolate cake and chantilly crépes -- when the Next Big Thing comes along. But if there's a traditional all-American dessert, it's pie. Fewer hip new restaurants offer pies these days (although the stylish 40 Sardines did revive interest in that old classic lemon meringue), but that doesn't mean customers aren't still ordering them.

In fact, the local Golden Boy Pies Inc., which bakes six days a week in a nondescript building in Overland Park, is selling more pies than ever. Diners, hospitals, casinos, cafeterias, corporate lunchrooms and coffee shops in five states are buying between 300 and 3,000 pies a day (as well as cakes, cheesecakes and brownies).

If you've ever piled a dessert plate with a slab of chocolate-cream or lemon-meringue pie from one of the casino buffets or gulped down a late-night snack of coconut-cream pie from a 24-hour diner, you've tasted Golden Boy's top-selling products. Since 1962, owner Terry Hunt has been baking and delivering pies to restaurants in Kansas and Missouri; he expanded his sales into Iowa, Nebraska and Illinois a few years later. His early repertoire was uncomplicated -- apple, cherry, raisin, lemon, blackberry, chocolate -- because he was a one-man operation. In those days, he borrowed the kitchen in his uncle's restaurant, the now-closed Upper Crust Pie Shop.

Today Hunt has 35 employees and sells 40 varieties of pie, 13 kinds of cheesecake, 21 cakes and 5 layered tortes. Employees churn out hundreds of perfect pie crusts in two shifts, operating a massive Rube Goldbergesque contraption called a Colborne. At the same time, other workers are whipping together hot vanilla pudding and fluffy meringue in giant steel vats -- the base for twelve different cream pies, from peanut butter to maple-pecan.

Cream pie volume picks up in the summer months, when fruit pies become less popular, but Sales Manager Connie Campbellsays the Top Five list stays pretty consistent: coconut cream, chocolate cream, cherry, apple and sugar-free coconut cream. Last year's disastrous cherry crop forced Hunt to raise prices by nearly a dollar on cherry pies -- "but people kept on buying them," he says.

And if raisin pies aren't especially fashionable in Kansas City, they're big business in smaller towns and rural areas, Campbell says. "They still love them in Topeka!"