Family ties make incredible pies
Aphrodite’s legacy: Peggy Vogler carries on the organic traditions of her late father Allan Christian
Sometimes, when you think you have it all figured out, it’s the unexpected curveball in life that points you in a surprising new direction.
For Peggy Vogler, who not long ago was a working mother of three with several enterprises to keep her busy in her adopted town of Whistler, that curveball headed her way soon after her father’s death, at the age of 63, in April 2008. Here’s the backstory. Vogler’s father Allan Christian was something of a renaissance man, raising his family in North Vancouver and immersed in the corporate world, until one day he decided to return to his youthful roots down on the farm.
For Christian that meant upping stakes, leaving the big city and living and working in a much more spiritual and healthful way in the Fraser Valley, on the Glen Valley Organic Farm Co-Op.
It was everything he loved: the hard work, the rich soil and the growing and harvesting of the fresh organic food that gave him such pride to share with others.
Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that one day when his mother was visiting, the two of them picked some organic apples from the farm’s orchard and baked up a rather delectable pie.
It was the fresh apples, of course, that lent it that homespun flavour, but it was also all about the crust, which we’ll get to in a moment.
Fast forward to 2003 when Christian, whose connections included friends and business owners back in the city, listened not only to all their pie-raving advice but to the call of his own adventurous, entrepreneurial spirit, and opened a pie shop on West 4th Avenue, near Dunbar.
His daughter remembers how unusual that seemed in fast food nation: “We said, ‘Will people just got to a shop and just buy pie?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, people will love organic pies.’”
He was right. The organic pie was so good and so in demand that Aphrodite’s Pie Shop also started offering savoury pies, like turkey pot and even seasonal tourtiere, and then decided to serve salads and then other fresh organic meals and before long Christian was not only the proprietor of a pie shop but of an adjoining name-saked cafe.
And then came the curveball. Christian got sick with cancer, but he so loved the restaurants and his customers that he kept working right up until he went into the hospital.
When he died, it was up to his kids to determine what to do with their dad’s bricks-and-mortar legacy.
Peggy’s brother had been working with their dad just before his death, but a few months after their father was gone he decided that running the business wasn’t to his career tastes. And so it fell to her. “Never in a million years did I think I would be doing this,” says Vogler, 49.
“But I thought we were going to have to sell it, to close it down, and then I sat on it for a couple of days and then I said, ‘No, we can’t do that.’”
She took over the business — though she still keeps active in Whistler — and has made a few changes these past seven years, including moving the 60-seat, full-service cafe last January down the street to the corner of West 4th and Dunbar, while keeping the two little storefronts kitty corner on the south side for the pie shop and on-site bakery.
Here’s a warning: If you turn up for the legendary Sunday brunch at the cafe, expect a crowd and a long wait. And it can get busy, too, at the little pie place across the road.
But hear this, too: The pie (gluten-free is also available) is worth every minute shuffling your feet and staring at your phone while waiting for a table.
Pastry chef Alexandra Heidl and staff turn out more than a dozen varieties of sweet pies and several versions of savoury pies.
And, yes, the secret is in the crust, best described as not just tender and flaky, but fulsome. The recipe started with that old-school pie crust baked up by Peggy’s grandmother on the farm, but the ingredients were refined by her dad over the years, including the use of organic palm shortening.
Inside those crusts is Fraser Valley farming at its finest: local organic crops the cafe and pie shop use year round, fresh and frozen.
Taste tests of the apple pie ( which feature organic hard sweet apples like Gala and Fuji) and raspberry-rhubarb pie leave no mystery as to why Aphrodite’s is lodged deep in the neighbourhood’s culinary heart.
A standard 10-inch pie is $30, the six-inch is $12 and a single slice is $7.50. Under the glass domes you’ll find flavours like blueberry, cherry, lemon meringue, peach, blackberry apple, pecan and even chocolate banana cream.
Some stats: In a year, the pies baked in Aphrodite’s Cafe and Pie Shop use 4,500 kilograms of rhubarb, 7,250 kilograms of apples, 2,000 kilograms of cherries, 1,250 kilograms of raspberries, 4,000 kilograms of blueberries and 4,500 kilograms of organic shortening.
Last year, the bakery turned out close to 15,000 pies. On Thanksgiving alone, about 500 pumpkin pies went out the door.
If Vogler is run off her feet — and she is — she is happily so. Pies, she knows, make everyone feel a little better.
“I think it’s the ultimate comfort food,” she says. “It just brings you back to a simpler time.”