Twenty years before Elvis was drafted, the San Diego Chicken Pie Shop was expanding hips instead of shaking them. With a different war looming, southerners flocked to California for work and were rewarded with a little piece of home: chicken pot pies, mashed potatoes and gravy. Business boomed. Lines snaked out the door. More chicken pie shops opened. The little comfort food factory became a piece of San Diego history (see this awesome photo), and a little empire was born out of fixing the city’s pot pie holes.

Half a century after the music died, only one San Diego Chicken Pie Shop is left. Despite a plaque at the front boasting the year 1938, this particular establishment isn’t the original. Still, a step inside feels like a trip through time to a kitchen that serves up bonafide American pie. I remember leaving the uptown landmark on my first visit, thinking, “Wow, how great is it that this place is mere steps from my apartment?” then, “What the hell is it doing here in 2009?”

Blown up newspaper articles, advertisements and menus from the restaurant’s history decorate the walls of the San Diego Chicken Pie Shop. I particularly love the lede on one 1940 ad: “Apartment dwellers and aircraft workers welcome this home-like atmosphere.” As an apartment dweller, I would agree, but it’s the prices that I welcome most of all. A pie dinner – which includes a giant pot pie, vegetables, mashed potatoes, cole slaw, dinner buns and a dessert pie – costs a mere six dollars. While that’s a large jump from 1948′s price of fifty cents, the cost-to-consumption ratio is caloric robbery.

When southern American comfort food began to earn the label soul food, the San Diego Chicken Pie Shop – thanks to notable San Diego food critic Eleanor Widmer – earned its own title: prole food. The term – which describes hamburgers, hot dogs and other foods that prioritize price and convenience over nutrition – fits. The price is definitely right, the nutrition is definitely lacking, and I can imagine highfalutin types raising their noses at the suppression of class in favor of cholesterol. The term “proletariat” lost its relevancy fifty years ago, and yes, you can spend more than your paycheck on a hamburger these days, but that’s 2009. Inside the San Diego Chicken Pie Shop, Elvis has yet to be drafted, Ritchie Valens has yet to board a plane and the word “gourmet” must be French.

Like a good prole food restaurant, the Pie Shop is void of all glamor. The dining area feels like a recreation room that has been converted into a cafeteria. Nothing on the menu is dated past 1950. The same goes for the Pie Shop’s waitresses, who push around wheeled carts full of pies, smell like too much hairspray and speak in middle-America accents. A rusted metal cash register is still bolted to the counter, and tacky chicken-themed decorations overpopulate spare counter surfaces. I’m not sure if I would call it a “home-like atmosphere,” but it sure is comforting.

I can imagine this place in the forties, crowds of factory workers piling in at six in the evening. Nowadays the clientele is divided between families with young children, old folks on their way to bingo and the occasional comfort food fan who doesn’t fit in. As that comfort food fan, I love the San Diego Chicken Pie Shop. The history is interesting, the atmosphere is casual, the prices are amazing and the food is legitimately delicious. The pie dinner, which almost everyone orders, is the definition of satisfaction and proof that San Diego’s got prole.

It’s too much food for six dollars, and except for the always-bland vegetables, everything is delicious. The Pie Shop’s dinner buns are freshly cooked, its mashed potatoes and gravy are spot on, and its dessert pies taste homemade. Even the coleslaw, despite its dull appearance, has inexplicably made it to my top five favorite slaws list.

The title track here, of course, is pot pie. Starting with a pastry that is flaky, buttery and slightly doughy in the perfect way, the eponymous pie is loaded with turkey, chicken and gravy. Free of the usual pot pie vegetables, San Diego Chicken Pie Shop’s pie is the real deal – pure, unadulterated comfort.

Someone once told me that time traveling to forties and fifties America would be dangerous, because nobody could survive eating grandma’s cooking every day, smoking unfiltered cigarettes every hour and drinking in tiki lounges every night. The San Diego Chicken Pie Shop, as rich in cholesterol as it is in culture, is ready to back this notion. After eating here, I feel like Elvis Presley on the wrong side of the war, bloated and lazy. The secret to eating chicken pie must be to stay in the shop, safe from the past fifty years of modernity.

Or, you can buy a few pies frozen, bring them home, hum “American Pie” while you’re heating them up and whistle “Bye Bye Birdie” as you sit down to eat.

San Diego Chicken Pie Shop
2633 El Cajon Blvd
San Diego, CA 92104
619.295.0156

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 10:12 am and is filed under San Diego.