Pie in the sky hobby
Journalist John Forsyth ’75 chronicles the whereabouts of the nation’s best spots for dessert
by Jessie Milligan
John Forsyth ’75 and wife Jennifer created www.americanpieways.com to extol the virtues and chronicling the whereabouts of the nation’s best spots for great pie.
It was the chocolate meringue pie at Fort Worth’s Paris Coffee Shop that got them hooked.
Now John Forsyth ’75 and wife Jennifer Forsyth spend what little spare time they have in search of the perfect slice of pie.
John is an editor on the national desk at The New York Times. Jennifer is an editor at The Wall Street Journal.
Recently, the couple started www.americanpieways.com, a Web site devoted to extolling the virtues and chronicling the whereabouts of the nation’s best spots for great pie. Real pie. Not frozen. Pie like mother used to make.
The quest takes them to spots such as the Red Arrow Diner in Manchester, N.H., where they ran into a delightful dessert known as brownie cream pie.
American Pieways shares John’s storytelling skills as he describes stopping at Bubby’s in Tribeca for a slice of banana cream to fortify himself before a woefully inadequate yet expensive dinner at a fancy restaurant. He writes of the surly pie lady at New York’s Little Pie Co., which makes a sour cream apple walnut pie worthy of any verbal abuse that may occur at the counter.
Reviews of the all-American dessert are about pie shops as far flung as Sublime Cakes and Pies (specializing in key lime pie) in Hanahan, S.C., to Schmucker’s Restaurant in Toledo. And of course, the Paris Coffee Shop makes the review list.
John is the son of the late John Forsyth '35, a former TCU biology professor for 36 years, and the late Mary Howze Forsyth, who worked in the Mary Couts Burnett Library for 18 years.