Petaluma Pie Company
125 Petaluma Blvd North, Petaluma, CA
http://www.petalumapie.com/
Review date: May 2011

Sigh. We had such high hopes....

Carlos loves pie, and he adores meat pies especially, having grown up with the British-influenced steak-and-kidney pie in Hong Kong.

The trouble is that pie is all about the pastry dough. And if you can't make a good pastry, the fillings have a big strike to overcome. And if the fillings are so-so...well, we'll say that PPC seems to be trying their best, but what they make just isn't to our taste.

It's probably healthy. The dough tastes like it has the minimum amount of fat and almost no salt. Unfortunately low salt = low taste, when it comes to dough. I always find it amusing that people rave about Bouchon Bakery's breads and pastries. They're good because they use a high amount of salt, people! Salt isn't the root of all evil, so it's time to get over the whole must-always-avoid-it extremism. 

Petaluma Pie is big on vegetarian pies. The spinach-cheese-onion tasted only of spinach and red bells, with an unidentifiable layer that might have been cheese but tasted more like tofu cheese with the consistency of a hard-fried egg white. The mushroom-Gouda had lots of sliced fresh sauteed mushrooms, but the Gouda was evident only in strong aroma, not really in flavor or any visual sighting.

The cheese burger pie was a loose jumble of sauteed high-quality ground beef with no cheese whatsoever, so far as we could tell.

The strawberry and chocolate cream pies were real whipped cream (light, not heavy cream), but fillings were neither sweet enough nor intensely flavored enough to be excited about. 

The shop is a little hard to find, being off a small plaza so that it isn't visible from the street when you first look for it.

Overall, pleasant, but not quite good enough to be worth a return visit.