Bubby’s Pie Co., is a Tribeca institution that has been around since 1990. Founded by Chef Ron Silver, who even then, a twenty eight year old chef, had a deep fondness for American home cooking, especially pie. In 1990, Tribeca was a backwater neighborhood without even a traffic light. On cold nights, the cobblestones would glisten and flicker under the fires of 55 gallon barrels, odd characters huddled around passing bottles of cheap wine around, and somewhere around two in the morning the smell of baking pies would fill the streets. It was an oddball neighborhood sparsely populated with strange artists living in cavernous apartments. After some months selling only wholesale pies, the windows gated up like Wonka’s factory, Bubby’s opened as a restaurant the day after Thanksgiving, cooking for artists, movie stars, teamsters, and anyone else who liked family food.

Bubby’s has always been about families. On any given day there are any number of children running around, clutching balloons in their hands. The company itself is very much like a family, many of those who work there having been there almost from the beginning. Nothing made this more clear than September 11th, and the weeks after when customers, firemen, Bubby’s staff, and whoever else needed a comfortable spot to have a slice of pie and a coffee and savor some sense of the familiar.

Chef Ron has, over those years, continued to double his enthusiasm for home cooking. He has driven fifteen hundred miles for a burger; he has weathered tornadoes to compete in world championship barbecue competitions; he has begged grandmas for recipes that they would have rather gone to the grave than parted with. He is at Bubby’s every day with hands in the pie.

In 2003 Bubby’s opened a second location in DUMBO, Brooklyn, with a spot right on the East River between the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge.

In 2007 John Wiley and Sons published Chef Ron and friend of the family and pie maker angel, Jen Bervin’s pie cookbook: “Bubby’s Homemade Pie”. The book is available in bookshops and at booksellers on line across the globe. And it’s a really good book if you want to make pie!