At Second Breakfast Pies, the Hobbit way is baked into every crust

On a plate in the oven there baked a pie. 

Not a soggy-bottomed pie, filled with the likes of mealy fruit and soupy goop, nor yet a mass-produced, tasteless pie with nothing in it to savor or go “Mmm!”

No, this was a Second Breakfast pie, and that means comfort.

I go to Lane County Farmers Market fairly often, but it wasn’t until recently that I stopped in my tracks after the warm, rich aroma of fresh-baked pie hit my nostrils. 

I hunted down the source and found myself in front of the Second Breakfast Pies stand, where owner Amy Romero fluffed up cardamom whipped cream, then plopped it on a hearty berry shortcake. I marveled at the ultra-flaky, melt-in-your-mouth texture of the savory potato leek hand pie. 

The pie crusts at this Eugene pop-up bakery are all hand-mixed and -rolled and -crimped, the same way Romero’s grandfather, Donald Felthauser, showed her. 

“It’s always all butter,” Romero added. “He said, ‘Don’t use anything but butter.’”

And that’s where this adventure begins: A man from a long line of Bavarian dairy farmers (of course, the crust would be all butter), one who served in the Navy as a cook and would wake up very, very early to whip up 2,000 pancakes for his slumbering crew (of course, they were made from scratch).

Felthauser was a very well-to-do grandfather. He lived about 45 minutes from Anchorage and five hours from where Romero grew up in rural Alaska. She’d make the long trek every summer to stay with him and her grandmother. Those visits were a refuge from what Romero called a “chaotic, abusive” home life. 

She ate ice cream for the first time at her grandparents’ home. In Felthauser’s garden, she learned to smell the strawberries and feel how alive each one was before eating them. 

“He taught me presence,” Romero said.

Felthauser also got her into baking. Her first lesson: Cracking an egg. 

“I’d crush it, and I’d make a mess, and I’d look at him like I thought I was going to get hit,” she said. She was 4 at the time.

Instead, he giggled and threw flour in the air, making another little mess and booping her nose. Little by little, she nailed egg cracking, then he taught her about the all-butter crust.

By the time Felthauser was diagnosed with cancer in 2016, she had the whole pie down. 

Going on an adventure

In October 2017, Romero’s life was in the midst of great change, messy like a house at the start of a deep cleaning. 

She had just finalized her divorce when she flew to Hawaii to officiate her sister’s wedding. 

Her grandfather had died four months earlier, which marked four months since she’d become sober. Shortly after officiating, she headed to New Zealand for a trip.

Years before, Romero had wanted to travel, but she instead settled for the familiar, comfortable social norm: Moving back home to Alaska with her mom — they had lived in Florida after her mom got divorced — going to school, getting married. 

Now, she was purging all that with nothing but a backpack and a book on all the film locations for “The Lord of the Rings.”

“I’m in New Zealand, doing all these bucket list things, and I’m sitting on these giant boulders in the middle of nowhere, thinking, ‘How magical is this Earth that we live on?’”

After traveling for a year and a half, she helped a friend move from Colorado to Eugene. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, she extended her stay, eventually becoming an Oregonian. She worked at a coffee shop and a hospital before becoming a substance abuse counselor at a local treatment center. 

“I was trying to get people to understand it’s not the alcohol, it’s a side effect of the actual issue,” Romero said.

For Romero, who had her first sip of beer the same year she learned to crack an egg, and whose father fed her wine coolers at 8, guiding people through their issues was equally healing.

Along the way, in 2021, she met Davey Romero at a Coalessence Dance event. He’d gone to school for dancing and she loved expressing herself through movement. Afterwards, they sat on the front steps of WOW Hall, talking about their grandparents. 

“I felt that same heart-coherent energy that my grandfather had, and I decided to follow it,” she said.

Months into their relationship, Davey Romero encouraged her to open Second Breakfast Pies.

“I could just see that’s where her heart was at,” he said. “She loves to cook for people, and she loves to take care of people in that kind of way. I guess deep down it felt like the authentic thing to do.

“‘You love doing this for people,’” he told her. “‘Maybe you should take a chance on yourself.’”

Out of the frying pan and into the bakery

At the treatment center, Amy Romero would often bring in pies for her colleagues and give them to friends. By November, several asked to buy whole pies from her for Thanksgiving.

“I was like, ‘OK!’ And then I tried to make 26 pies in my apartment, with roommates,” she said. She also only had a compact oven to bake them in. “It was bad.”

Davey Romero bought her a small freezer for the dough. They kept it on the balcony. 

“I remember going in and out of the sliding glass door, thinking, ‘I just need to do something different,’” Amy Romero said.

By December, she quit her job as a substance abuse counselor to pursue baking full-time. 

That next year, 2022, was one of lessons in running a baking business. She learned about the right licensing outside Oregon Country Fair, where a health inspector came by the pie stand and asked, “Do you guys have a license?”

They did not.

“Did you make these pies in a commercial kitchen?”

Yes, but it was through a friend who let Romero borrow the space, so she didn’t have the paperwork for that, either. 

“You can give it to your friends, but I want you to hear me: You cannot sell this pie,” the inspector said.

“We chalked it up to the ‘school of life,’” Romero said. She decided to tell customers what happened and why she couldn’t sell her pies. She could give it away, however — if they became friends.

“OK, friend!” Romero remembered folks saying. “And then my community showed up and started tipping so graciously, we broke even. We couldn’t learn that in a book: That is experiential learning at its finest. It humbled us.” 

Those were the beginnings of Romero’s customer base, or rather, her Second Breakfast Club.

A warm welcome

If you didn’t know, Hobbits eat seven meals a day, one of them being second breakfast. They take great pride in gardening and good food and community.

Since launching Second Breakfast Pies in 2022, Amy and Davey Romero have run their business the Hobbit way: They make their own elderflower syrup, pie crusts and fillings (chocolate silk, salted honey, tart cherry crumble, to name a few), sausage gravy and biscuits and, well, actually, everything they make is from scratch. 

They source locally and organically where they can and buy dry ingredients from Hummingbird Wholesale, an employee-operated organic food manufacturer and distributor in Eugene. To avoid further waste, they bake their pies in glass dishes, which customers can return for a $5 deposit.

“It’s an extensive process of choosing our values over the cheaper choice,” Amy Romero said. “If we can’t do it that way, we don’t want to do it.”

It’s something she’s seen echoed in the Celtic heritage, in businesses such as Farmers Union Coffee Roasters (her first job in Eugene) and in the LGBTQ+ community, many of whom are Second Breakfast customers.

“We have a bunch of different crowds,” she said. “But overall, it’s really just the people that are choosing love instead of fear.”

After a stint as a food truck bakery outside Spacebuds the Dispensary, the couple pivoted to mostly working events such as Celtic festivals, Renaissance fairs and farmers markets. They quickly doubled their sales at Lane County Farmers Market since snagging a spot there earlier this year.

“I follow them wherever they go,” said longtime customer Eric Garcia, while grabbing a potato leek hand pie at the Tuesday farmers market.

Amy and Davey Romero, who are both 39, traced their lineages back to Scotland, so it only made sense for them to pop up at the Albany Scottish Festival, where they sold 1,200 pies last year. 

“It’s really great, but we also don’t want to lose our quality,” Romero said. “So if we run out, we run out.”

At Eugene Scottish Festival last year, they met a vendor named Charles Lamb, who couldn’t have a more perfect last name for his product: Haggis, Scotland’s national dish of sheep organs and aromatics traditionally cooked in an animal’s stomach. 

“Would it be blasphemy if I put your haggis in my pie?” Amy Romero asked Lamb, who laughed and reminded her and Davey Romero of their grandparents.

He eventually asked them to take over his business, wanting to retire. On top of their hand pies, shortcakes, and biscuits and gravy, they now sell Lamb’s Haggis at Lane County Farmers Market on Tuesdays and Saturdays, as well as the market’s new Sunday addition in Springfield. 

The bakery is returning to Eugene Pride this weekend, June 27, for the second year. 

“I’m still part of that community,” said Amy Romero, who is pansexual. 

When she moved to Eugene, Romero briefly volunteered at TransPonder, a local nonprofit that is founded and led by transgender people. 

“It was really eye-opening for me with how many young people struggle with asking for help with changing their identity,” she said. “There are so many people that want to help, but unfortunately, the people who demonize them are a lot louder. It was humbling to love people and tell them that they’re beautiful.”

That experience lent itself to Second Breakfast’s ethos: “What we’re trying to create is a space where you can come as you are, and you’re welcome,” Romero said.

Return journey to apple dumplings

Amy and Davey Romero have a pie warmer for their stand now, and a countertop oven to bake their hand pies on site. They just moved into a new commissary kitchen in Veneta called The Scullery, where they also plan to host a pop-up restaurant starting this winter. 

Eventually, they will buy land to fulfill their Middle-earth dreams with a world of their design, creating a bed-and-breakfast, camping spots, a food forest that will supply Second Breakfast’s pie ingredients and feed visitors, a giant gazebo and dancing area and outdoor kitchen. 

“It was my grandparents who cultivated this space for me to see the magic,” Amy Romero said.

When her grandfather was diagnosed with cancer, she remembered him telling her, “I had a great life. It’s my time to go and make room for somebody else.”

She quit her job to take care of him. The last few weeks, as her grandfather drifted in and out of consciousness, morphine dripping, he asked her to make him an apple dumpling.

Romero sliced and spiced the apples, wrapped them in a buttery pastry — Felthauser’s recipe — and baked it until golden, the crust flecked with cinnamon sugar, a warm ball of Hobbit-level comforts. 

She cut a little piece, with ice cream, of course. And fed him.

“For him to go, ‘Mmm,’ that was everything,” Romero said, tearing up. “I got to love him the way he loved me.”

The first few years of Second Breakfast Pies, apple dumplings weren’t on the menu.

“We didn’t even think of it until a year ago,” she said. 

So Romero sliced some apples, and the oven heated, and she and Davey Romero had a very pleasant day baking dumplings for their Second Breakfast Club.

If you go

Second Breakfast Pies will be at Eugene Pride from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday, June 27, at Lane Events Center. Find the pop-up bakery regularly at Lane County Farmers Market from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Tuesdays and Saturdays, and at Springfield Farmers Market from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Sundays. You can order whole pies, cakes and other items online up to one day in advance and pick them up at the farmers market. Shipping is also available.