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SFist Eats: Mission Pie
We've been meaning to try Mission Pie since we read about it in the Chron -- it's a homey dessert cafe (which we need more of in the Mission!), whose pie ingredients are grown by Mission High students at a local organic farm, to teach them agricultural, environmental, and nutrition skills. The students then staff the cafe behind the counter. (The pies themselves are currently baked off-site, but they're hoping to get a professional pastry kitchen built into the space, to teach the students cooking skills next.)
Yay, everyone wins! Students get good job skills, the owners give back, and we get some yummy organic pies in the neighborhood. Plus -- Mission Pie stays open late! (until 10 p.m. on the weekends.) This is PERFECT.
It was kind of a quest to find the store -- the directions say it's at 2901 Mission, but after some frantic running around back and forth, we finally noticed the "Mission Pie" sign at the corner of 25th and Mission pointing down 25th Street. So turn the corner at the Southern Exposure gallery and the cafe entrance'll be right there: you can't miss the neon EAT PIE sign, or the board of today's specials.
As you can see, the specials the day we stopped by were strawberry-ollalieberry galettes, banana creme, walnut, and peach. And how were they?
They were GREAT! We tried the banana creme and the strawberry galette, but ate those slices before thinking we should probably have taken a picture of them for you. The picture to your right are the walnut tartlets instead, which also looked great.
The crusts were whole wheat, all-butter, and like homemade, only much flakier (yet more solid) than the all-butter crusts we make at home. The berries were fresh and sweetened just enough to take the edge off, but without drowning their pleasing tartness. And the banana creme was smooth as a pillow, if your pillow has just-right thinly-sliced pieces of banana at the bottom.
The inside of the cafe is exactly what you imagined! It's sunny, there's books about responsible agriculture on the wall, cheerfully-painted signs, a picture of a map with a sign that says "HOORAY! We bought a combine!" (for a farm they're working with in Michigan), and probably enough seating for about 15-20 people. When we went, the crowd was equally mixed between early-adopter Mission hipsters and teenagers going through a mild Goth/emo phase.
SO GOOD. You should totally go!
