Our Story

Piebird is a labor of love, sometimes less love and more labor.  It often means late-night pie crust sessions and seeing how many books on tape you can burn through in a week.  

At the heart of the operation is Annalee DePaoli who left the food and beverage industry, trading in the long hours and late nights of the restaurant grind for the long hours and late nights of raising kids (4 to be exact).  Over the next few years, she continued to provide desserts to some local restaurants and stay busy with special orders and special events.  This side hustle continued to grow and in 2015 the opportunity arose to level up and move the operation to a street-front location in the Upper Lawrenceville neighborhood of Pittsburgh. 

Setting up shop in what was, incidentally, a food photography studio, Piebird launched a kickstarter and went through the painstaking process of building out a commercial kitchen just around the corner of her home on the street affectionately referred to by friends and neighbors as Carnegie Beach. 

Once the kitchen was completed, Annalee soon realized that to be a “legitimate” business, she’d need a name.  After many hours of brainstorming this new endeavor was to be called Piebird Pastry Kitchen, quickly followed by  “Oh! I guess I have to make pies now!”