“I could just stay here all day,” Sami McRae declared as she settled into the comfortable curve of a leather chair in Poorhouse Pies’ new Cambridge café. The retired pastor had just finished the Cubano pie special for lunch. At $12 for a hefty double-crusted wedge filled with ham, roast pork, Swiss cheese and pickles served with a side salad, it was deliciously filling and reasonably priced, she said.
The recent Friday visit was McRae’s second, she said, though she was already a regular at Poorhouse Pies’ Underhill shop, where she picks up donated pies to “feed our neighbors” at the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Burlington. On those trips, McRae also buys pies to eat at home with her husband and four local grandchildren. Among the family favorites is the pulled-pork macaroni-and-cheese pie made with slow-roasted pork, barbecue sauce and a buttered panko crumb top.
“Oh, my. So good,” McRae said with a contented sigh.
For its first 12 years, Poorhouse Pies was a tiny home bakery known for sweet pies sold from a photogenic backyard self-serve shed. Customers lined up on weekends for its occasional doughnut days. In 2021, Suzanne Tomlinson bought Poorhouse from founding chefs Paula and Jamie Eisenberg and moved the operation into a new shop and commercial kitchen on Route 15 in Underhill, less than half a mile from the original. Tomlinson, now 52, added savory pies, quiches, and sweet and savory pocket pies. She also brought back doughnuts and built a full-service catering operation, which offers far more than pies.
The biz was soon busting at the seams. To meet demand and continue growing, Tomlinson bought the 4,500-square-foot Cambridge building that was most recently Taste of Texas BBQ on Old Route 15 just outside Cambridge village. She worked with her husband, contractor Jon LeBlanc, to build out a full kitchen with a dedicated doughnut corner and the elegant but warm café space.
The café opened on March 20. Like its Underhill sibling — which continues to be pie-making central and to sell pies — it has a cooler and shelves stacked with Poorhouse’s whole pies to go, from Indian veggie curry to gluten-free blueberry crumb. But a new focus for Poorhouse at its second location is counter-service breakfast and lunch, which can be enjoyed in the high-ceilinged room comfortably appointed with a mix of tables, couches and armchairs. There are also picnic tables with a lovely view of farmland and the distant Green Mountains.
Naturally, pie features on the café menu, but the kitchen team led by executive chef Chris Lataille, previously of Bleu Northeast Kitchen in Burlington, also makes light breakfasts, breakfast and lunch sandwiches, salads, and soups. Employees restock the pastry case frequently with fresh doughnuts, cookies and other housemade pastries, and pour a full range of drinks, including espresso, beer, cider, wine, and a small selection of cocktails and mocktails.
The warm, relaxed ambience and breadth of eating and drinking options make it tempting, as McRae noted, to hang around all day. Over a pair of recent visits, I made a solid attempt at doing so through breakfast, a midmorning snack and two lunches with a couple hours of work between bites.
On both days, a stream of customers — retirees, people having meetings, parents with babies and at least one published author (former Seven Dayzer Emily Hamilton) writing her next book — ebbed and flowed, with a definite lunchtime spike.
Though the counter-service line became long at times, it moved smoothly, and staff members were always cheerful and helpful. Tomlinson has been lucky to land seasoned hospitality pro David Keck as front-of-house manager. “He lives for service,” Tomlinson said.
Keck also happens to be a master sommelier and owner/winemaker at Stella14 Wines, for which he and his wife, Lauren, grow grapes in Jeffersonville. The tight wine list at Poorhouse, all available by the glass, is his domain. I regret that I did not stay late enough in the day to order a glass of the Stella14 Birches bubbly red blend ($14) or Italian lambrusco di Sorbara ($11), described as “cheerful … everything you want right now.” That will definitely happen in the future.
During a morning visit, I sipped a well-made latte ($6) with a generous wedge of buttery-crusted spinach, onion and mushroom quiche served with fruit salad ($10) and then nibbled on two top-notch doughnuts ($2.50 each).
While I’ll almost always take a yeasted doughnut over the cake variety, the beautifully crumbed, sugar-dusted old-fashioned rivaled the airy puff of a jelly doughnut with its freshly made tart-sweet raspberry filling.
For my first lunch on a cool, damp day, I chose the comfort-food pairing of melty grilled cheese made with cheddar, Swiss and herbed goat cheese dipped into tomato soup ($15). A nearby diner ordered the same after seeing mine. We agreed that it delivered on its soul-soothing promise, needing just a few shakes of salt to bring the rich, tangy soup into balance. As for the browned-butter chocolate chip cookie ($2), no notes and no remaining crumbs.
On my second visit, I tried two lighter but substantial and satisfying salads. The salade Niçoise ($14) with crisp greens, green beans, sweet cherry tomatoes, hard-boiled egg and plenty of briny olives was topped with beautiful rare tiles of seared fresh tuna. The grilled chicken salad ($16) was similar to a Cobb without the blue cheese or hard-boiled egg but with lots of crispy bacon, a full fan of avocado slices, pickled red onion and a delightfully creamy pistachio dressing.
Lest the pies felt ignored, I took a raspberry-almond pocket pie ($8) to go. It was made, I later realized, with the same house-cooked whole-raspberry filling as the jelly doughnut, plus generous knobs of chewy almond paste encased in the flaky but sturdy signature Poorhouse crust.
Full disclosure: I did take a couple bites into the sparkling sugared crust with an expertly crimped edge on my way home. That was necessary research to test Tomlinson’s assertion that an advantage of pocket pies is you can eat them while you drive. She is correct.
At the end of the day, it’s about the pie.
Suzanne Tomlinson
Poorhouse currently makes about 3,000 whole and pocket pies weekly. Demand for varieties is seasonal, but overall, Tomlinson said, “We have not found a low pie season.” Since she bought the business, she said, her team has refined the crust recipe to an ideal ratio of butter, high-quality shortening and a touch of cream cheese for flavor, texture and integrity — the crust is flaky but doesn’t completely fall apart upon first bite or forkful. This is especially important when eating pocket pies while driving.
While Tomlinson is happy to have expanded the menu beyond pie, she noted that, for Poorhouse Pies, “At the end of the day, it’s about the pie.”
Keck and chef Lataille plan to collaborate on a series of pop-up evening events after the café gets its legs under it, but those will stay in keeping with the feeling of the pie shop and café, Keck and Tomlinson said. After posting information a few weeks ago for a $115 farm-to-table dinner with paired wines, they thought better of it and have postponed the evening series kickoff for now.
“We’re just more salt of the earth,” Tomlinson said. “People really love that we’re casual, approachable and family-oriented.”
As if hired by central casting to prove that point, Brianna Wilson and her 9-month-old son, Callum Grogan, arrived to meet a friend, Ryan Jensen. Wilson lives in Hyde Park, and Jensen works in nearby Jeffersonville. The two spoke glowingly of birthday pies from Poorhouse they had each recently enjoyed: peanut butter cream for Jensen and key lime and triple berry for Wilson. “And I’m a cake person,” Jensen said.
Wilson and her son were sharing a morning yogurt parfait ($9) with fruit, granola and maple syrup, and a blueberry-oat muffin ($4). “This is me and Callum’s little date spot,” Wilson said as her son happily explored the couch they were sitting on while stuffing muffin bites in his mouth.
Jensen had made short work of a bacon-jalapeño pocket pie ($8) and said he was considering buying another for the road. Now that I’ve done my due diligence, I could have informed him that a pocket pie makes an ideal road-trip nosh. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Pie Squared | With its new Cambridge café, Poorhouse Pies adds a second location, on-site dining and a broader menu”
This article appears in May 27 • 2026.
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