MEET VIENNA
THE PURE PASTY CO.
RESTAURATEURS:
If you haven't heard of a pasty, you're missing out. They are a delicious snack or meal (get a couple) originally from Cornwall England. They've been around for hundreds of years. Here in America our culinary favorites don't match the centuries of scrutiny that these treats have had to endure. Not only is the history behind the pasty extremely interesting - steeped in folklore around miners in the 19th century, but they are also absolutely delicious. They make a perfect on the go snack, and that's just what they're meant to be. Let's chat with Michael Edward Burgess, a Native of the U.K. now living in Vienna, who has introduced us to this delectable snack through his little shop: The Pure Pasty Co.
What brought you to the U.S.?
I was a banker for HSBC working in Canary Wharf. I've been in banking and Information Technology for a long time and I got to the stage where I wasn't doing anything techy anymore. I was managing teams in India and throughout Europe and I wasn't enjoying the job at that level. I was an
adrenaline-junky/techy that was a trouble shooter - pulling all nighters - that kind of thing. I was a snowboarder, and I used to come over to the States with all my buddies, and we'd be snowboarding in either Colorado, or Montana, or up in British Columbia... and we'd always moan about "there's no pastys and there's no meat pies" cause we're all beer-drinking northern lads and that's what we were craving. So we're thinking this kind of snow resort is perfect for this, let's do it. And eventually, 2008 comes along, you could feel the credit crunch coming, it was time to get out. Banking was releasing a lot of staff, especially middle and upper management, and I was sitting in that target zone, and I was sitting there going yeah - me - I'm ready to walk. And I was set up with enough money to start something up. I was married to an American at the time that decided that the DC area is where we would land. We dropped in to Vienna - and loved the place - it was very similar to the size of my hometown back in the UK. It has a very similar feel and market demographic feel to it - and it just seemed a good fit. I wasn't a bakery person, I'm not a restaurant guy, I'm not a chef. But, what I did when I left HSBC, I went and toured Cornwall England, where the Pasty is from, just toured around for weeks, stopping in every pasty shop that I could go to -and found out as much as I could. Some would tell me a lot, and some would tell me to bugger off.
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What's the history of the pasty?
So, its from Cornwall UK - and what was firing up my enthusiasm was, I was watching a food product that had gone from being either a local icon in the southwest of England whose representation in the rest of the country
was a low level item on a gas station shelf, but a couple of big companies (sales-wise) had seen the opportunity - one of them being West Cornwall Pasties, and they opened up outlets all over the UK just doing this. And their growth was phenomenal - and I thought, even if I just do a little bit of that - I'm good. But we went down a different route, and like everything life does to you, we didn't have big corporate backing and everything like that, ya know, I put everything in to one location here, and I took what I perceived to be a more artistic artisanal high quality route with it, and took it one stage further than West Cornwall Pastys did, where they took it up another level or so. I wanted to make this more gourmet. And I can do that because there's nothing here to compare me to, there's no one saying you're 5 times more expensive than the other guy. I'm farm to table - I can pay my staff a decent wage, I'm dealing with farmers, and I want to have the best stuff.
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What is this annual competition you go to every year in the UK?
We've gone every year since 2017. There are a lot of people involved in this competition. And every type of competitor from grandma and amateurs to professional and corporate sections. It has the traditional
Cornish pasty section and then its got the open section which is the creative side.
So, we put in 8 entries every year into the corporate open/creative sections. The first year we won something in the amateur section - my daughter won something because we armed her up with a gluten free recipe.
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What's next for The Pure Pasty Co?
We've thought about expansion and partnering up - and I'm no terf boss, but I need to have a say. So we've been working with a local architect Tim Kyler, and we're going to take the space behind My Eye Doctor. On the first of April we take the keys to that and start building it out to be a
British pub. So we're taking the hardcore mainline items that are selling from here, and putting them into an environment that's a 2900 square-foot space - pub. We'll have local beers, but also some of the classic imported from England, and meld it together with some of the things that our customers have asked for like scotch eggs, bangers and mash, fish and chips all those iconic things - we can wrap those around the spine of a pie shop menu and see where it goes. But I learned to walk from opening this place - you can have a great business plan and that's important - but you've got to be able to flex and change and swap things out. I was going to start with food trucks - 20% of my sales would be through the door, and the rest would go on the truck. But, people really liked the store. So we refocused everything on the store. We can change, and we look forward to serving our customers.
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The Pure Pasty Co. is located at 128 Church Street NW, Vienna. Visit them for lunch and dinner, or visit them on the interwebs:
What is it that elevates the your pasty?
First its the people that put time in - Nicola on my staff has been with me since before we opened over 10 years ago. Stewart has been with me almost 9 years, and Jen has been with me for a long time. Jess has also been here for a long long time. We look after our people, and we don't just hire whoever so we can do everything on the cheap. It's the same with the ingredients, we have one farm in Midland Virginia, Mast farms, and we
get all our beef and pork from them. I go down to the farm, and see that everything is black angus cattle roaming around, free range in and amongst the trees and the hogs are outside, they're free range wallowing around in crap enjoying themselves - happy pigs make great sausage rolls. And then, our chickens are from Bell and Evans which is the same that whole foods has used. So everything we try and keep up as high as we can possibly push it, within reason. I mean, you still have to think about price point, you can't just ignore it. We're dealing with a product that has had its reputation such that its not going to let you charge $15 per item, ya know. So we think we've got it 'round about the right spot.
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Where does the pasty come from traditionally?
So the pasty comes from the tin miners food from Cornwall UK. Way back when, they were mining tin, and other metals like tin, and wherever you get tin, you get arsenic. So their hands were toxic. So they had to very actively enforce no eating what you've touched. You've got young guys down there working all day with a pick ax and a shovel, they want to eat everything they can get their hands on. So you want to discourage them
from eating certain things 'cause they can't wash up. A lot of those mines are on the very tip of land. Some of them are 1 mile down, and 5 miles out under the sea bed. And we're talking about people who were doing that in
the early 1800's. What made the Cornish tin miners a powerhouse and respected throughout the world was that they were using the technology out of the industrial revolution that was being developed in the midlands in the UK. The steam engine was being utilized for everything. The typical stone-built buildings at the mine head on top of the cliffs were actually the engine houses for steam engines 'cause they were the pumps that were keeping the mines dry. So to keep these young guys from eating what they touched, they would take these young guys down, and it's a dark nasty environment, and there are these noises in the mine that you hear - there's a lot of creaking timbers. And the older miners would tell the younger miners that those noises were the spirits of the mine called the knockers. And you have to keep the knockers 'on side', and keep them happy, and then there would be good luck and there wouldn't be any cave ins. And the way to keep the knockers happy was to feed them. So what they do with these pasties, is they would take their pasty out of their pockets and put it on the mining equipment to heat it up - the pumps would get really hot and heat up their food. So they would hold on to the crimp and eat everything out of the middle and then throw the crimp away and what happens is, the rats in the mine would come and eat all the crumbs and when they would walk back through where they had eaten at the end of the day, they look at the area, the food is gone, and it reinforces the superstition cycle, the knockers have eaten everything.
Now, a treasured skill in Cornwall, and here in our shop is crimping, and it's one of the things we have to teach our staff in the kitchen.