Sweetie Pies Bakery & Café

Seasonal pies, Belgian chocolate and butter in the bake

The case is built around pies, cakes, pastries, cookies and dessert bars, with seasonal fruit doing most of the work. Pie comes first: pumpkin is the one Sweetie Pies Bakery & Café is best known for, strawberry-rhubarb carries the brighter end of the year, and the regular run moves through apple, pecan and chocolate pecan. The baking reads American rather than French, with sweet cream butter, fresh fruit, nuts and Callebaut chocolate from Belgium as the useful tells. Cakes sit in the same program, from Summer Berries and Cream and Tres Leches to mousse cake, New York-style plain cheesecake, Lemon Blueberry Cheesecake and Dulce de Leche Cheesecake. The café side is not an afterthought either; it is the reason the counter works from the first coffee through lunch.

The Napa Mill room works like a regulars' counter

The room has the habits of an older bakery: mismatched antiques, local art, vintage cookware, big communal tables, and a counter that has to serve breakfast people and cake-box people at the same time. It sits in the historic Napa Mill, part of the Hatt Buildings and Warehouse of 1886, so the walk in has more grain to it than a shopping-strip bakery. Early on, the case is fullest and the muffins, scones, croissants, coffeecake and breakfast sandwiches make the most sense. Later the room tilts toward lunch, sandwiches and salads, and toward people carrying out whole cakes and pies. Indoor and outdoor seating give it some flexibility, but the counter is the point: look at the fruit pies, then the roulades, then decide.

Order pumpkin pie first, then look for the Yodel

Start with pumpkin pie when it is on, because it is the clearest single argument the bakery makes: a familiar American form, made seriously, in a town that mostly sells itself on other things. If the season points elsewhere, strawberry-rhubarb is the brighter fruit order. For cake, the Yodel is the house move, a large cream-filled chocolate roulade; the red velvet Rodel is its louder cousin. A morning order can be simpler, coffee with a scone or coffeecake, then a cookie or dessert bar to take away for later. The quiet pointer is the seasonal pie case. It changes with the fruit, so the right order is usually the one sitting there in full slices rather than the one you remember from last time.