Humble Pie for All Your Holiday Pie Needs

Sean Jett grew up a few blocks from where his pie shop now sits. That detail matters more than it might seem to, because Humble: Simply Good Pies doesn’t read like a concept dreamed up by a consultant trying to chase a trend. It reads like a guy who grew up near White Rock Lake and decided the neighborhood needed a place that made pie the way his family always told him pie should be made — from scratch, with real butter, without apology for taking longer than it needs to.

Sean and his wife Erin run the shop at 9014 Garland Road, directly across from the lake that shaped Sean’s whole relationship with this part of Dallas. The shop sits in a strip mall that doesn’t try particularly hard to impress you from the parking lot — the interior is where the actual argument gets made, with wooden games like chess and Connect Four set out on the tables, self-serve coffee, and the kind of cozy, unfussy room that makes people linger over a single slice longer than they planned to.

Heading into the Fourth of July, the pie to know is the one that’s been quietly building a reputation since the shop opened: the Old Fashioned Apple. Each pie carries two full pounds of fresh apples — a mix of tart Granny Smith and sweet Gala, balanced against each other rather than buried under sugar. “Our apple pie is not drenched in sugar, but is pure apple goodness,” is how the shop describes it, and the description holds up. It’s the rare apple pie where you can actually taste the apples doing the work, rather than a uniform sweetness covering for whatever was on sale that week. Whole pies run $55 and serve a proper holiday table; mini pies are available at $7 each if you want to sample your way through the rest of the menu first.

And the rest of the menu is genuinely worth exploring before you commit. The Damn Fine Cherry — built from both tart and sweet cherries, requiring 24 hours of work to get the fruit ready before it ever sees a crust — is the other fruit pie people drive across the city for. The Chocolate Cream isn’t built on pudding the way most chocolate cream pies cheat their way through; it’s a real chocolate pot de crème under whipped cream and dark chocolate shavings, which one regular described as a little plate of sin and meant it as the highest compliment. The Coconut Cream comes overfilled with toasted coconut folded into the filling and piled on top. The Banana Cream uses actual sliced bananas in a real custard rather than the artificial yellow pudding base most bakeries default to — a detail multiple longtime Dallas pie eaters have singled out as the thing that converted them.

On the nut and chess side, the Alabama Pecan goes the deep molasses route for people who want their pecan pie to taste like something happened to it, while the lighter corn syrup pecan handles the traditionalists. The shop’s take on a Kentucky Derby pie — Texas pecan with a shot of Herman Marshall Texas bourbon and semisweet chocolate worked in — is the version for people who think a classic pecan pie could stand to be a little more dangerous. The Buttermilk Chess, finished with brown butter for a nutty edge most versions don’t bother chasing, is the old-school Southern entry that earns new converts on a regular basis. And the Bayou Goo — a cult favorite that shows up in nearly every glowing review of this place — has become the pie regulars recommend to first-timers before they’ve even looked at the case.

For the heat of a Dallas summer, the Texas Lime — a Persian lime and condensed milk custard, tart and cold — and the shop’s icebox pie, built on a gluten-friendly graham cracker crust and finished with fresh blueberries and house-made whipped cream, are both built specifically to cut through July humidity rather than add to it.

Humble also runs a small savory menu if pie is doing double duty as dinner before dessert: a take-and-bake Chicken Pot Pie finished with a bourbon cream sauce, and Louisiana Meat Pies built on a Natchitoches recipe, packed with ground beef, pork, and Cajun spice. Both are the kind of thing you grab on the way out after you’ve already committed to a sweet pie, because why not.

Gluten-free options run daily on Coconut Cream, Chocolate Cream, the Coconut Joy variation, and Alabama Pecan, with other flavors available gluten-free on 24 hours notice.

The shop sells out regularly, which the owners are upfront about — if everything’s gone, they close early rather than pretend otherwise. For a holiday weekend table that depends on dessert actually being there when you need it, that means one thing: order ahead. Humble is open Wednesday and Thursday 11am to 6pm, Friday and Saturday 11am to 9pm, and Sunday 11am to 8pm. Closed Monday and Tuesday. Phone is (214) 458-9039. Online ordering and pickup scheduling are available at humble-pies.com.

Pick up an Old Fashioned Apple this week. Whatever you’re grilling on the Fourth, it deserves a pie that was actually made by someone who grew up down the street.