Restaurant criticism peaked in 1990, when FBI special agent Dale Cooper says to the waitress at the Great Northern Hotel in Twin Peaks, Washington, “You know, this is — excuse me — a damn fine cup of coffee. I’ve had I can’t tell you how many cups of coffee in my life, and this — this is one of the best.â€
I was 12 then and could have told you exactly how many cups of coffee I had drunk, milky, sugary swill I had snuck during the fellowship hour after church. But I was obsessed with “Twin Peaks,†and I was obsessed with Agent Cooper’s obsession with coffee, as imagined by David Lynch and Mark Frost and portrayed by the brilliant Kyle MacLachlan.
Cooper’s studious sniff of the freshly poured coffee and demonstrative first sip. His little smile before he tells the waitress what he thinks. His emphasis on damn in “damn fine.†For better and worse, I think I have been seeking that kind of moment ever since.
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I didn’t think about this scene when I first heard of Damn Fine Hand Pies, which business partners Madeline Hissong and Gene Bailey opened in June in Shaw after building a following with a stall at the Tower Grove Farmers Market. I didn’t think about it when I ate one of the hand pies, either.
Instead, I made the connection through one of Agent Cooper’s other obsessions: doughnuts. Now, you don’t need a critic to tell you ºüÀêÊÓƵ is a great doughnut town, one of the best in the country, certainly the most underrated. A plain glazed from Pharaoh’s Donuts. An apple fritter from Donut Drive-In. A cinnamon glob from the Donut Stop. Whichever shop, whatever style, I agree with your pick.
Especially if you pick Damn Fine Hand Pies’ chocolate-glazed doughnut. The sprawling cap of dark-chocolate glaze is rich without being fudgy, a crucial distinction otherwise fine bakeries can miss. With your first bite, this icing collapses into the shop’s signature sourdough-brioche doughnut. This is as ethereal as any traditional yeasted doughnut in town, and the glaze suffuses it with chocolate flavor without overloading the brioche’s airy charm.
It is, excuse me, a damn fine doughnut — one of the best I’ve eaten. And, no, I can’t tell you how many doughnuts I’ve had in my life.
Hissong founded Damn Fine Hand Pies as a cottage-law business in the kitchen of her south city home. Her mother, who lives nearby, washed the dishes. Her boyfriend packed the food into a van. From there, the hand pies traveled to the Tower Grove Farmers Market, where they debuted during the 2021 season.
Hissong had attended culinary school and worked in restaurants. The conventional path to being a chef or sous chef in some fancy restaurant didn’t suit her, she told me in phone interview. A native of a small, rural community in northern Indiana, she comes from a family of bakers. Her great-grandmother sold pies from her house. She set the pies on the front porch; her customers put the money in her mailbox.
“Nothing in the world makes me feel like pie,†Hissong said. “And I just wanted to share that with people.â€
Bailey joined Damn Fine Hand Pies in 2022. At first, he too washed dishes. Also a veteran of ºüÀêÊÓƵ restaurants, mainly in the front of the house, he knew Hissong and her work. He had been thinking about opening a sort of bodega — a neighborhood bakery and sandwich shop. Gradually, the two forged a business partnership and planned the bakery’s brick-and-mortar location.
This occupies a small storefront on Shaw Boulevard at Lawrence Street. There are a few seats at a counter along the front window, but carryout is the focus of the counter-service operation — though it might take all of your willpower to make it past the front patio’s picnic tables under colorful umbrellas with your purchase. While you wait for your order, you can read the framed newspaper article from three decades ago about Hissong’s great-grandmother, Ruby Reinholt, and her pies, crust recipe included.
Damn Fine Hand Pies displays its signature dish at the front counter, with the handwritten menu of fillings posted on the wall behind. You can count on such savory options as dill cream cheese, its crust sprinkled with everything-bagel seasoning, or peppery sausage in luscious white gravy. A seasonal fruit option might be plum with a hint of cardamom’s energizing spice and a grace note of brown sugar.
Whatever the filling, it competes with the crust for you admiration. These hand pies crackle like a great croissant, and each bite is nearly as buttery. This is more than a metaphor. Like a croissant, Damn Fine’s hand pies use laminated dough. Like a croissant, I would happily order one unfilled to enjoy simply by itself with a damn fine cup of coffee.
Hand pies, doughnuts, bread: Hissong, Bailey and their team can bake. I have already mentioned one of ºüÀêÊÓƵ’ several great purveyors of apple fritters. The version here, with an unassuming, but vital touch of nutty brown butter, joins their ranks.
Even when they feature a doughnut as elaborate as a plated dessert — say, with a passionfruit glaze, coconut whipped cream, passionfruit curd and a sprinkling of both toasted coconut and grated coconut cake — all of those tropical accents heighten, rather than cloak, the essential greatness of the sourdough-brioche doughnut.
You could and maybe should build a complete meal at Damn Fine Hand Pies, both savory and sweet. The bakery’s bread, which is also available as whole loaves while supplies last, cradles an excellent breakfast sandwich with cheese, runny egg and (optional) bacon and, for lunch, a stack of roasted-turkey slices.
Then again, you could also make a complete meal with both a savory and a sweet hand pie, or a savory hand pie and a doughnut. The idea, like the hand pies and doughnuts themselves, is better than damn fine, though I can’t print my preferred description in a family newspaper.