A new food truck has rolled in to campus.
Northeast Pie Company, a business that started in Rochester, NH in 2015, has now taken spot in the Conant Hall Courtyard, near the Spaulding Life Sciences Building – the same place that used to be occupied by the Higher Grounds coffee cart until fall 2018. Northeast Pie Company had a soft opening on Friday, Sept. 6, and the official opening was on Monday.
The main dish Northeast Pie Company serves is in their name: pies, just at a smaller size. They serve dessert pies, such as classic apple pie and also entrée-style pie: pies for breakfast and for lunch, with their filling reflecting entrees one would expect a breakfast or lunch: bacon, egg and cheese pie for breakfast or pulled pork pie for lunch.
The owner, Michael D’Amico, said that the idea for pies as a business model came from causal pie making.
“[We] started making them for fun and they got really really good, and no one has them,” D’Amico said.
Northeast Pie Company’s former location, also as a food truck, was open five to six days a week, serving a significant following of customers and offering frozen orders, D’Amico said. Before bringing the truck to campus, he was planning on turning it into a brick and mortar store to keep up with the demand, but in preparation for this store, he closed the food truck for the 2018 season once he saw the opportunity to bring Northeast Pie Company to UNH.
The “bid [for the location] went out in October,” he said, and since securing the location, he has had to work on the necessary permits to run a food truck on campus.
The hallmark of Northeast Pie Company, D’Amico said, is that “everything is from scratch.” No component of the food is processed. This includes the pie dough, but also other items on the food truck’s menu: such as the hot chocolate, granola bars, and even the flavoring for iced coffee and lattes—there are no pre-made syrups.
D’Amico also gets ingredients from Three River Farmers Alliance, an online marketplace that sells products grown by local farms. He does not use pre-cut or frozen ingredients.
“There’s a lot of time that goes into each one [of the pies].” He said. He arrives on campus at 5 a.m. to begin preparing for the day. “We don’t serve anything that we wouldn’t eat.”
The menu depends on the rotation of pies for the week. Each week will feature three to four types of lunch pies, with at least one being gluten free and another vegetarian. This is to “appeal to everyone…so everyone [can] eat.” A couple pies may be menu fixtures, such as pulled pork pies, because of their popularity.
When asked last Friday about any anticipatory feelings for the official opening, D’Amico said, “It’s exciting and it’s scary and it’s exhausting, but at the end of the day I love it. If I wasn’t tired and overworked the demand wouldn’t be there.”
Northeast Pie Company will be open Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 2 or 3 p.m. D’Amico is hiring students to work in the food truck and interested students should contact him.
