Sent from heaven: Angelwood Pies is coming to Leederville this summer

If there’s one topic certain to ignite passionate discourse, heated arguments and rapturous recommendations, it’s pies.

Take it from us: over the years we’ve fielded endless discussion on the topic, whether in our comment sections or even just our friends trying to get the scoop on where, actually, the best pie in Perth can be found.

“You know, everyone that we’ve talked to has got a tale about pies,” Patrick Wallis (pictured below right) tells us. We’ve popped by his Leederville pie-shop-in-the-making, Angelwood Pies – huddled in the middle of a building site, the former tenant’s giant tropical parrot mural keeping a watchful eye over us.

Formerly the operations manager for Modus Coffee, Pat’s Angelwood co-owner is lauded chef Richard Overbye (pictured below left), whose CV has seen him on the pans in not just Perth’s best restaurants, but some of the world’s.

“One person we were talking to would always go down to, was it the Dardanup Bakery?” Pat continues. “He’d go down something like every week to have a pie with his family. And country road trips are so synonymous with it.”

“We hope to capture a bit of that, where people are like… It’s religion, and it’s built into their life.”

The two met when Modus hosted Super Glou, a pop-up collaboration between Richard and Commune Wine Store.

“Pretty quickly, we realised that we had a pretty shared vision around what we want in a business one day,” explained Pat. “But then we also have completely different skill sets, which is pretty great – and pretty hard to find, most of the time.”

“Richard is very process driven: the fine details, but getting it done.”

Richard already had pies on the brain: a particularly lacklustre post-hike pie had him thinking “I could do better,” but pies had already been his go-to hangover and homesick-busting snack.

“Pies used to be my hangover food, which is great. But then I lived overseas a few different times: four months traveling, a year in Norway, and just under two years in the UK. So every time I came back, my parents would pick me up and we’d go past a bakery and grab a pie. Or another time, I landed at night time and mum put a frozen pie in the oven for me so that when we got home, there’d be a pie ready!”

“When I lived in Norway, I worked with another Australian guy, and we found this tiny little pie shop run by an Australian couple in the central markets in Oslo. We used to go down there pretty regularly on Sunday morning, have a coffee and a pie and reminisce.”

Pat reluctantly admits he was more of a sausage roll kid growing up, but eventually the whole pie malarky grew on him.

“The original concept was all Richard. But the more I thought about it, and the more I started thinking about pies, the more I was like, ‘They’re delicious. You can put anything in them. They’re very scalable, and there’s a market there.’ And the more the idea came out, the more I was getting passionate about the product itself.”

When we speak to the pair, the menu is still a Wonka-esque, nebulous concept of unlimited possibilities – but a few flavours are at the forefront, at least for now.

“If you can think of a dish, you can pretty much always put that in a pie!” laughs Pat.

“We always get caught up on the fun other fillings, but we’ll have a core range that’s the best version, hopefully, of a steak and pepper, or a beef and stout.”

“One of the things that we’ve been pretty clear on is that you’re able to hold it without it falling apart in one hand. Not oily – because a lot of the artisanal pies, you’ll have it in a paper brown bag and there’ll be an oil circle at the bottom.”

Of the dozen-ish daily pies, around half will be seasonally rotating, with three or four vegetarian options in the mix – not including a limited range of meat and vego sausage rolls.

“As as a chef, within the last few years I’ve become pretty obsessed with Indian food, I think it’s super underrated. ” adds Richard.

“I just went to India this year with my partner and I realised that you can put a bunch of Indian dishes in pies as well… And then speaking to Indian friends, they’re like, ‘Well, yeah, a samosa is like the Indian version of a pie.’”

A Moroccan tagine-inspired pie is also on the cards, utilising preserved Meyer lemons Richard raided from a friend’s tree, while winter will call for hearty Euro-leaning fare like braised lamb leg with black olive, a riff on Alsatian choucroute, or a celeriac and Gruyere vegetarian pie.

“The flavours are really pretty endless – but when we do go with a certain cuisine or a certain dish from a certain cuisine, it’ll be as traditional as we can make it. Not just, you know, dumping curry paste in and just calling it a Thai green curry: it’ll be as authentic as and true to form as possible.”

The pair also chat about a few sweet options they’re considering, which channel bakery nostalgia without strictly adhering to the format.

“We’ll have a small selection of sweets as well – not necessarily always going to be baked goods, but old-school sweets like fudge, or house-made musk sticks.”

“If we do a sweet pie, it would probably be like a larger format slice – but it could be a vanilla slice. Obviously we’re going to have a lot of used coffee grounds, so we could do a spent coffee slice, or a caramelised pear slice.”

“And then we’ll have a bespoke drink selection – so some local sodas and not so local, but still cool. Obviously amazing coffee!”

(From seasonal produce from local producers and utilising waste product to considered uses of multicultural recipes, Angelwood’s approach might officially be called Corporate Social Responsibility, but we’d just as quickly put it under the umbrella of common sense and thoughtfulness.)

“It just all came together super quick,” explains Richard.

“I drove past Palace Barbers, and I love the artwork they’ve got out the front – I had that image in my head of an old school barbershop, and then the pie idea came about. I’ve had other business ideas in the past, but this one just stuck.“

“In 2021, I was going through the process of setting up a fine dining restaurant: I looked at multiple spaces, met with all different sorts of property owners and investors and all that kind of stuff. And it would still have been a good product – but it just didn’t happen to work out at that that time. It felt like I was just head butting a wall the whole time. Whereas this, everything just kind of fell together so fortuitously, so it was like ‘This is what I’m meant to be doing’.“

Angelwood Pies will be located at 663 Newcastle Street, Leederville, and is set to officially open early February.