VEYO, Washington County — What do you get when you mix a 600-square-foot building in the middle of (almost) nowhere, several big bags of flour, several more big bags of sugar, other ingredients such as spices, eggs, apples and cream, and a woman who makes pies like Ferrari makes cars?
You get Veyo Pies, the best little pie shop in Utah.
In so many ways, the store defies logic. Its location is 20 miles north of St. George, tucked next to some storage units where Highway 18 widens to accommodate the metropolis (population 483) of Veyo.
Don’t blink or you’ll still miss it.
Inside, the décor is best described as work-in-progress. The upper walls are adorned with frequent buyer 10-punch cards that customers have redeemed for a free pie. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands. A map of the world takes up one wall, with pins marking all the places the pie shop's customers have come from.
Devaney Lomenick, who, along with her husband Curtis owns Veyo Pies, is fine with the spartan design. “Put too much stuff on the walls and it collects dust,” she says, “and dust and pies do not mix.”
Just like that, she’s identified the business’s top priority and its secret to success. It’s the pies. They get attention like an English lapdog. Everything else is an afterthought.
Devaney has four full-time pie-makers, two for fruit and two for cream, and she insists that they follow the recipes to a T. No shortcuts. No skimping on ingredients. No assembly line. No pie presses. Every pie is hand-made, right down to the crimping of the crust. The only concession to automation is an electric dough roller. The pies are prepped the night before and baked fresh every morning starting at 6 a.m. The store opens at 10 and closes at 6, more often than not with everything sold.
All this transpires under Devaney’s watchful gaze, which she admits is a rather amazing development since, for one, she didn’t like pies growing up and, for two, her baking background was less than zero when she got started in the business.
But fate intervened when she needed a job in 2001 and found one at the Meyo Merc, the town’s general store. Along with a lot of other things, the Merc sold pies. The first resident pie-maker was Evelyn Daniels, who later turned over the baking duties to another Evelyn, Evelyn Yaw, who was the pie-maker when Devaney came on board.
She became Yaw’s assistant. Or, to be more accurate, apprentice.
“She took so much pride in making pies,” remembers Devaney. “This wonderful older woman, very kind, very gentle. But she wouldn’t let you cut corners. Everything had to be just right. She’d say, ‘If you make a pie good enough, people will keep coming back. Because it’s not just a pie, it’s a pie that makes them happy when they eat it.’ She really spoiled her customers.”
Devaney learned to love Evelyn, pies and pie-making, in that order. She also learned that “Whoever said ‘easy as pie’ did not know what they were talking about.”
In 2006, Devaney became manager of the Merc’s bakery. That lasted until 2008, when the store went out of business.
That’s when her husband, who had watched the daily procession of cars make the trek from St. George to Veyo for a pie fix, said, “We could keep this pie thing going.”
“He had no idea what he was getting us into,” says Devaney. “Or how much people love pies.”
They moved into the vacant space next to the storage units and opened their stand-alone shop in June of 2009. Ever since, business has kept rising. In the high season, they sell an average of 100 pies a day. In the offseason, they average 60. Banana cream is the perennial top seller, followed closely by apple and mountain berry.
In the über high season — aka Thanksgiving week — the shop averages 400 pies a day, and could sell more if it had a bigger capacity. Demand is so high that no orders are accepted less than a week and a half in advance of the holiday. This year, the deadline is this coming weekend of Nov. 15.
They bring on extra staff the week of Thanksgiving and make pies around the clock, moving them out the door at the rate of about one every minute they’re open.
“People tell us their cars turn in here automatically,” smiles Devaney. “Evelyn was right. They keep coming back.”
Lee Benson's About Utah column runs Mondays. Email: benson@deseretnews.com