With a love of pie and an entrepreneurial spirit, wife-and-husband team Annika and Rob Corbin have gone a long way in the pie business. Following their success in the colleges-town of Claremont, the pie purveying pair have headed towards the bigger time: Old Pasadena, where they throw open their doors Saturday, November 5.
I Like Pie. Could any store be more aptly named?
“Pasadena has been our destination for years,” Annika said at a soft grand opening party at the Raymond Avenue shop Thursday evening.
“The architecture, the vibe, everything about it,” she began. “It’s just took us a lot longer to get here. But, the business is centered around the concept of pie being an experience and, you know, experientially, we mean completely different. You can see we’ve got this small format, and so we really like the idea of our sort of individual experiences.”
Corbin pointed to a row of various, small “jelly jar pies” of assorted flavors, sitting on refrigerated shelves below the counters. They are small individual pies, perfect for a steaming cup of coffee.
“So,” she said, “We’ve got jelly jar pies — those are our inventions. We’ve really worked a pie into the same format as more individual. I mean, what is a cupcake but a small cake? These are little pies.“
For Corbin, it was simply a matter of combining her entrepreneurial spirit with her lifelong love of pies.
“I am a baker,” she said. “I’ve always loved to bake, not professionally, really just recreationally, but I’m an entrepreneur more than anything.”
She may be underselling herself on the whole recreational baker thing. When her first shop opened in Claremont in 2012, it wasn’t long before it was ranked one of the best pie shops in America, and appeared on a host of national “best of” lists.
Since pies are among the favorite things in her life, she devotes a lot of time and attention to developing all of the recipes, some of which she creates herself, and others which she develops with her baking team.
Said Corbin, “We have hundreds and hundreds of flavors.” The shop does five seasonal menus a year as well as some items that remain in rotation year-round, like her favorite, lemon.
“We do sweet and savory, we do vegan, our range is huge. But, I try to keep something on the menu for everyone in each menu rotation, of course.”
Suffice to say that Corbin takes pie seriously. In fact, in her mind, pie is not only the answer, but it’s also the question.
“We’re trying to change the way people think about pie and I really think people are being pretty successful at it. We hear a lot of people who say, ‘I didn’t think I liked pie,’ but now they do. They like what we do.”
Corbin continued, “It’s just been a resurgence where people are willing to put in the time it takes to make that pie. But until then, most people my age had tasted their grandmother or mother’s pie, but not, not beyond that. A lot of people just quit baking. And so I think a delicious pie can change the way a delicious and innovative product can change the way you think.”
And, think about this: At the store’s official grand opening this Saturday, November 5, every customer receives a jelly jar pie of their choice with every purchase. All day long.
Because, who doesn’t love pie?
I Like Pie is at 38 S. Raymond Ave., Pasadena, CA. www.ilikepiebakeshop.com.
