Good Pies

42 Bell Street, Heidelberg Heights, Victoria

piemans.com.au

I don’t believe in Heidelberg Heights. It’s not a real place and people need to stop pretending there is a posh part of Preston because it makes you look like a weird snob. Trust me; you aren’t too good for Preston, no matter which private school you send Tarquin and Skye off to each morning.

The non-existence of this locality is a bit problem for me because there is a pie shop in that weird stub-end of Bell St where it turns one-way for about 100 metres and apparently it’s in ‘Heidelberg Heights’, which (as we have established) is not real. Pieman’s Son is real though and it’s completely worth navigating the somewhat terrifying racetrack pit-lane part of Bell St to give its pies a red-hot go. Park on the wrong side of the road — they encourage it.

Piemans Son presents as a bit fancy, but do not let the people sitting at tables using cutlery to eat a Cornish pasty (whyyyyyy? a pasty has a built-in handle!) fool you — these people sling a damned good pie. There’s a lot on the menu, including Chicken & Leek, Thai Chicken, Moroccan lamb, and a vegetarian Curried Cauliflower & Pea number that I’m going to go back and rip into later in the week.

I had the Beef Ragu which had structural integrity to write home about, good depth, and a rich slow-cooked beef ragu filling. You might have expected the ragu to flop out of the pie after the first bite, but it all hangs out in the casing to the very end. I would go so far as to call this ragu tenacious.

They serve it to you on a plate with cutlery, a bit of fancy tomato stuff, and some greens. I am sure this is delightful for people who want to feel like they’re hedging bets for their colon, but I have already decided to die from scurvy, so I just went in hands first and left the salad to go back and tell its people the terrifying tale of what it saw.

As a quick aside, they sell party-pie versions of many of their flavour combinations, and they are pretty much to scale. This opens up a lot of opportunities to do a photo shoot of you in forced perspective eating tiny pies so that everyone on Tinder legit thinks you’re a giant. I hope your loins are girded because nobody is going to swipe left on the chance to meet a bona fide huge human that has a bunch of pies. 🥧

PS: I asked AI to check this pie review and apparently my review needs work.