The Penguins' official pastry shop is celebrating 20 years and four generations

When Kathy Battis imagined opening a bakery, she wanted it to look and feel like a house. She and her husband John had been selling cakes, cookies, and other sweets out of their home for five years, and Kathy wanted that sense of neighborliness to carry over.

“I didn’t want it to look like a grocery store,” Battis tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “You knock on the door. Come on in. It’s hospitality."

Volunteering as a crossing guard near her children’s high school in Pleasant Hills, she noticed a building for rent, formerly Cloverleaf Cleaners. The Battises moved into the space on Clairton Blvd. and renovated, opening Pastries A-La-Carte on April 9, 2004 — 20 years ago this month.

“And we’ve been adding on ever since!” Kathy Battis says with a laugh, eventually absorbing a chiropractor’s office and Linguini’s Italian Grill.

Today, the shop, still in its original location, spans three storefronts and about 4,000 square feet — almost all of it for production carried out by a staff of 34. A 30-quart mixer from the Battises’ kitchen is still in use, and other homey touches remain: the front shop has red awnings and a triangular stain-glass window evoking a house. It’s also styled “upscale,” Battis says, to look like France, with a wall mural of traditional stone country villas.
“When I first saw that [wallpaper], I was like, this is home,” says Jessica Shincovich, the shop’s operations manager. She believes Battis' original vision still guides the shop and “reflects in our products” after 20 years.

Though Pastries A-La-Carte is known for its cakes, particularly wedding cakes, they make baked goods ranging from mini cakes (petit gâteau) to breakfast pastries like donuts, danishes, and eclairs to all manner of cookies. The bakery’s cookie cases stock everything from traditional chocolate chip and peanut butter to jam-filled butter cookies (“jelly teas”) to cream-filled lady locks.

At their 20th anniversary celebration that included a meet-and-greet with Disney princesses Elsa and Tiana — as big a draw as the sweets — the shop sold princess silhouette cookies and iced cookies in honor of Taylor Swift’s new album, released the same weekend.
Battis also takes some credit for Pittsburgh’s love of tortes; though Prantl’s Bakery popularized burnt almond torte, she says Pastries A-La-Carte preempted it with a still-widely-requested burnt almond raspberry flavor.

“All of a sudden everybody else start making it,” she tells City Paper.

The bakery first caught my attention as the official pastry shop of the Pittsburgh Penguins — a partnership lasting more than a decade. Though you won’t currently find their treats for sale in PPG Paints Arena, they service the suites and luxury boxes, and sometimes bake for the team. Pastries A-La-Carte even made Evgeni Malkin’s wedding cake — Malkin sent Battis a signed wedding photo — though she doesn’t remember working on it specifically.

“I might have!” she says with a laugh.

Part of the bakery’s longevity is that, from its inception, it’s been a family affair. Battis is a fourth-generation baker, and her great-grandmother, Ada Rennie, started the baking tradition after immigrating from England in the early 1900s. Battis remembers her great-grandmother hand-mixing ingredients to make bread, pecan rings, and chocolates in a bench oven, which Battis’s grandmother then helped sell door-to-door. Rennie was written up in Uniontown’s The Morning Herald in Aug. 1968 for 85th birthday, with the article noting that in a recent year she’d baked 2,300 pounds of fruitcake.
Battis’s mother, Rose Rennie, also baked, joining her daughter and son-in-law to open Pastries A-La-Carte at age 70. John Battis recalls that she shared her daughter's fastidiousness and “[made] sure everyone made the cookies exactly the way she wanted them. She'd come in early and check the cases and make sure those cookies were not out of line.”

Kathy Battis says that many of the shop’s baked goods today originate from family recipes. Greek-inspired pastries were passed down from her mother-in-law, while the bakery’s Fletcher horns — almond flour-made cookies rolled into a horn shape with fine sugar — came from her maternal grandmother.

Pastries A-La-Carte’s signature cookie, Alfie’s French creme, was created from a customer’s recipe.
“I believe [the customer, Alfie] came in and said, ‘I really love this cookie, but I don't want to make it anymore. Can you make it for me?’” Shincovich tells CP. “She was grateful to… have them and happy for her namesake.”

Reflecting on 20 years in business, Battis says, “It seems overwhelming. I'm glad that happened … but at the same time, I can't believe it's been 20 years. Twenty years of my life is gone!” In that time, she and John have celebrated 40 years of marriage, involved their children in the bakery with the hope it’ll remain family-run, and welcomed a granddaughter — marking the sixth generation in the shop who, when I visited, was steeling herself to meet Elsa.

Returning to her founding idea of making the bakery like a home, Battis reflects, “I try to concentrate on customer service, because I don't think there's enough customer service anywhere … I tried to teach my crew ...You're the bartender. When [customers] leave, they better have a smile on their face."

“Making people happy with the product. Creating things. That’s what it really is," she says.