From Crescent Springs, Kentucky
I could not let National Pi(e) Day go by without doing my duty as a member of Pie Nation. Had I not been obliged to go to Kentucky (yes, again) for work, I would have been celebrating Pi(e) Day in D.C. with fellow pie makers Tarts by Tarts (blogging as Nothing-In-The-House), who are throwing a cool local-radio-station fundraiser tonight. I couldn’t help with the baking from Kentucky, but I felt I must do my part. And so, when my work was done for the day, I asked the folks standing nearest to me where I might go for a good slice of pie. A friendly feminine answer came sailing over the cubicle divider: Oh, go to Rima’s Diner, over on Buttermilk Pike.
Buttermilk Pike? Are you kidding me? No way in hell I wasn’t going. And ten minutes later, with the aid of Google Maps and my trusty rented Ford Focus, I pulled up outside Rima’s (which, I regret to say, is not on Buttermilk Pike, but just off it).
Rima’s Diner
http://www.facebook.com/RimasDiner
(No website, but a Facebook page. Go figure.)
The friendly blonde who sent me to Rima’s had waxed poetic about their big case of pies. But when I got there, the case was heavy on cakes and light on pies. Only two kinds were left: white chocolate and butterscotch. So I went mano-a-mano with the butterscotch:
After a day that began at 4:30 a.m., rising in the dark to get to Baltimore-Washington airport for my flight, the butterscotch pie tasted pretty darn good at 3 p.m. But I would have to say that on any ordinary day, I’d have given it a so-so. The filling was dense and butterscotchy; no complaint there. But the all-shortening crust was pale and crumbly, and the canned whipped cream … well, they could have done better without a whole lotta trouble.
Still, I was happy to eat pie–butterscotch pie, at that–in a nice little local place so near to a street called Buttermilk Pike. You just don’t get these chances very often. And when you do, you oughta take ’em. Rima’s does get Atmosphere Points for the lace half-curtains, the Sinatra on the sountrack and the Elvis photos on the walls.
But I will set my sights on the pie place that the friendly blonde really melted down about: the Pine Country Restaurant in Williams, Arizona (which rated pretty high on Bill and Barbara Windsor’s Round America pie trip, as well). The very fact that she was able, standing in a small town in northern Kentucky, to instantaneously rattle off the name of the town where she had “the most marvelous pies” is a pretty big recommendation in my book. Add that one to the Pies Shops On Our List.
