WHAT EXACTLY MAKES A PIE A “KAUAʻI PIE”?

We hear something pretty regularly from first-time visitors to The Right Slice: I’ve never seen some of these pie flavors before and we take that as a compliment. Because we’ve never wanted to be a bakery that could be picked up, dropped into any town in America and look exactly the same. We’re on Kauaʻi and that should show up in what we make. Of course, there will always be a place for the classics. Sometimes you just want a familiar pie that tastes like something you remember from childhood, but living on Kauaʻi gives us a whole different pantry of flavors to play with like Lilikoi, Coconut, Macadamia nuts, Mango, Bananas, and Island citrus. One of our favorite things is watching someone read the names in the pie case and stop at a flavor combination they’ve never tried. You can almost see the conversation happening in their head. “Is that going to work together?” And sometimes the next sentence is: “Okay. Do you have a whole one?”  That’s the fun of food.

You can take something familiar like pie and make it taste like the place where it was created and food can become part of your memory of a place, too. Think about your own travels. There are probably foods you remember years later because they became connected to that vacation, town, restaurant or person. We love the idea that someone could go home from Kauaʻi and, months later, taste lilikoi somewhere and immediately think: “I remember that pie shop in Kalaheo.” So we have a question for you? If you had to choose ONE flavor that represents Kauaʻi, what would you pick?

Lilikoi? Coconut? Mango? Macadamia nut? Banana? Something we haven’t even mentioned?

Tell us. We’re always listening, you’ll never know when a customer’s idea might get somebody in our kitchen thinking… “Hmmm. I wonder if we could put that in a pie?”