Merri and Bill Tyndall keep the dining room and bakery cases chock-full of baked goods and knickknacks in a 1950s-era former filling station now home to the Mountain Pie Company. They decorate each table with different colors and patterns of linens, china, and silver from their personal collection. A blue ribbon from the 2010 Western North Carolina Apple Festival hangs on the pie case — earned for one of Merri’s apple pies made with local Honeycrisps and adorned with a crust made with leaf-shaped cutouts. “The pace is good out here, and people can sit awhile,” Merri says of the store that’s a few miles outside of downtown Hendersonville on a hilly countryside stretch of U.S. Highway 25. Specialties include old-fashioned pie varieties like North Carolina tart cherry, buttermilk, and Amish shoo-fly pie. The Tyndalls bake daily, and they tested their pie mettle recently when a bride-to-be ordered 11 different pie flavors for her wedding reception, held on the 11th day of the month, on a North Carolina mountaintop.
Mountain Pie Company
3400 Asheville Highway, Hendersonville, N.C. 28791
(828) 693-0501
mountainpiecompany.com
Visit the rest of the delectable independent, local bakeries in Our State‘s North Carolina dessert tour:
The Sisters McMullen
Jimmie’s Sweets
Rosebriar
Hayes Barton Café & Dessertery
Bread of Heaven Bakery
Cheesecakes by Alex
Paul’s Pastry Shop
Seaside Cheesecake Dessert Shoppe
Savannah Red
Bailey Café
The Bakehouse
Sugar on Front Street
To commemorate our 90th anniversary, we’ve compiled a time line that highlights the stories, contributors, and themes that have shaped this magazine — and your view of the Old North State — using nine decades of our own words.
From its northernmost point in Corolla to its southern terminus on Cedar Island, this scenic byway — bound between sound and sea — links the islands and communities of the Outer Banks.
Us? An icon? Well, after 90 years and more than 2,000 issues celebrating North Carolina from mountains to coast, we hope you’ll agree that we’ve earned the title.
After nearly a century — or just a couple of years — these seafood restaurants have become coastal icons, the places we know, love, and return to again and again.
