Get expert pie baking tips from Pat Rutherford-Pettine, former owner of Sugaree Baking Co., on the Arch Eats podcast.
Sugaree Baking Co., (1242 Tamm), the beloved 27-year-old bakery in Dogtown, will reopen in August under new ownership.
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Megan and Derrick Cobb have purchased the popular bakery from Pat Rutherford-Pettine and Jimmy Pettine. The Cobbs are hardly strangers to the Dogtown community: they grew up there, attended the same parochial school, met while working at Seamus McDaniel’s (which is owned by Megan’s aunt and uncle), and then opened Sweet Em’s Coffee & Ice Cream (6330 Clayton) in 2018.
The Menu
The Cobbs plan to preserve and utilize Sugaree’s time-tested recipes for pies, quiches, cookies whoopie pies, almond croissants, the humongous “Big Blue” blueberry muffins, and scones, of which Rutherford-Pettine is especially proud. “We do something different with our scones—that’s all I say,” she says. “But I’m passing the secrets along to Megan,” who emphasized being true to the Sugaree brand and maintaining its high standards. “We don’t want the customers to miss a beat,” she says.
Jimmy Pettine’s specialty is Sugaree’s popular chicken and beef pot pies, which are sold frozen. The pot pie recipes will be passed along as well.
Among Sugaree’s other specialties are its cakes, especially the coconut cake (so light that it’s also known as “cloud cake”). “Even after the closure, we continued to sell wholesale cakes to some of the more respected restaurants in town and still do,” Rutherford-Pettine says.
Sugaree’s wedding cake business was impressive as well. “I was making 250 wedding cakes a year at one point,” Rutherford-Pettine says. “I have no idea how I even did that. I did Megan’s [wedding cake] 10 years ago.”
Megan Cobb
The Operations
One of the few planned changes is to increase the hours at Sugaree from only Fridays and Saturdays to four days per week, says Megan Cobb. Another is to establish and nurture product partnerships with nearby restaurants and chefs.
The Pettines will remain in the neighborhood and plan to advise the new owners until the end of the year. “It gets tricky, especially at the holidays, knowing what items people want and how much they want,” Rutherford-Pettine says, “and we know all that.”
The Backstory
After closing its retail operations at the end of 2022, Sugaree hosted several pop-up events to sell pot pies and reopened in full for the Easter holiday and Mother’s Day, offering the same familiar menu items—“just doing what we always did,” Rutherford-Pettine says.
Sugaree has its roots in the Grateful Dead song of the same name. “When I was considering starting my own bakery, I attended an SBA seminar in St. Charles,” Rutherford-Pettine says. “One of their suggestions was to pick a name that meant something to us. On the way home, the song Sugaree came on the radio. I had been a Dead Head for years, and there it was, my darlin’.”
