Alyssa and Patrick Lewis are on top of the world.
The young couple that launched the Seattle Pie Company in 2009 are living a charmed life and their pies, considered among the best in Seattle, if not the nation, may soon get a whole lot more famous.
The couple will be featured on the November episode of the Cooking Channel’s “For the Love of Pie!” Exactly when the episode will air isn’t quite clear. It also isn’t clear that this photogenic and funny couple have had their last turn on the television. Depending on how the show turns out, these two may be a hotter commodity than their pies.
The premise of the program is that a pie craze is sweeping the nation and that pies are the next cupcakes. The program scours the nation looking for great pies and the show’s producers focused on Magnolia’s very own Seattle Pie Company.
“It’s been a dream,” said Alyssa Lewis with her infectious enthusiasm. “It’s just been awesome! We know how lucky we are.”
In many ways, the show is the perfect fit for this Puget Sound twosome.
Alyssa Lewis, who grew up in Snohomish County, has been baking pies for much of her life. She first began baking pies while working with Pamela Mack, owner of the Snohomish Pie Company. Alyssa’s husband Patrick was a residential homebuilder and developer who grew up in Lake Stevens.
In fact, she was being groomed to take over pie baking for the Snohomish Pie Company when tragedy struck. Pamela Mack died of cancer. The shock was so great that Alyssa left the company and pretty much stopped baking pies altogether.
In fact, Patrick says he rarely ate one of her pies, save for special occasions.
But the Lewises found their life change dramatically when the recession hit and the housing industry declined. Patrick decided to sell his entire business. The couple ended up selling just about everything, moving to Seattle and starting over.
There was only one problem: they didn’t know what they were going to do.
One day they happened to see a sign for pies and the two almost had the same idea at the same time: they decided to make pies.
“We vowed to do something that we could all do together, just our family,” Alyssa said, as her sons Luke and Owen play in the store and she holds 1-year-old daughter Nola.
The couple began looking for a location to make and sell their pies. They met famed Magnolia realtor Art van der Wel who helped convince them that Magnolia was the perfect location. The rest is local folklore.
The two remodeled the location at 3111 West McGraw St. by themselves. By July 2009, they opened the store on a Monday hoping to sell about 30 pies in a day. They sold 100. They couldn’t keep up with the demand.
By Thursday, they were out of all supplies and had to shut down the business and go to the store.
“We didn’t even know how to order supplies,” Patrick Lewis said.
Patrick, who is an amateur artist as well as a carpenter, began to experiment with baking pies and he got into the act, as well.
Within three months of their opening, a relative of the president of Metropolitan Market tried the pies and was so impressed he encouraged the grocery chain to stock the pies. Then KING-5 television aired a segment on the pie company.
“After that, everything just exploded,” Alyssa said.
Today, Seattle Pie Company pies can be found in the Metropolitan Market's six stores, Town & Country grocery chain and IGAs. During the fall and holiday months, the Lewises and their team of employees produce well north of 1,000 pies a day.
There is no doubt that this is a family operation. Alyssa’s mother works with them, as well as various other family members at different times. A grandmother and Patrick’s brother, Darren, have also helped make pies.
If this all sounds a little wild, well it is. But this couple, that splits their time between a houseboat on Lake Union and a home they have in the woods, get back to nature as much as they can. They also say they are trying to keep their feet on the ground and just enjoy the moment while raising and homeschooling their children.
But success has a way of making things wild. And things might be getting a lot wilder in the near future. So, stay tuned…
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