By Annie Groer
A single blurb graces the back cover of “The Red Truck Bakery Cookbook,” the first of two Brian Noyes recipe collections.
“I like pie. That’s not a state secret…I can confirm that the Red Truck Bakery makes some darn good pie.” President Barack Obama
The 44th chief executive became a fan in 2016, after Noyes wrote to thank him for White House efforts to end the Great Recession that nearly sank his original bakery in Warrenton, Va., eight years earlier.
“Just as the economy crumbled, my investors fled, and I was stuck trying to make it happen on my own. With hard work and 18-hour days we kept the bakery afloat, although I spent many nights worrying about paying suppliers and making payroll,” he told Obama.
A month later, presidential speechwriter Cody Keenan walked into the second bakery, in Marshall, Va., to personally deliver the boss’s appreciative reply. Alerted by a staffer that Keenan was also buying lunch and desserts, Noyes, who was traveling, strongly suggested the bourbon-laced sweet potato pecan pie by phone.
In mid-March, Noyes personally delivered three of those pies to Keenan, a slice of which became Obama’s official salute to Pi Day, the March 14 global celebration of the mathematical ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter: 3.14159. At exactly 3:14 pm on 3/14/16, a beaming president held up a wedge as White House photographer Pete Souza snapped away.
Noyes was thrilled. And the Red Truck juggernaut kept on rolling. To promote his 2018 debut cookbook, Noyes had the quote embroidered on a custom jacket and an elaborate cowboy shirt, both by the “rodeo tailors” at Fort Lonesome in Austin, Texas.
Well before the groundbreaking, Dr. Louise Bernard, director of the just-opened Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, asked Noyes to donate several pie-centric artifacts.
He was floored.
“Oh my gosh! Being permanently paired with the President through pie is phenomenal. Her out-of-the-blue request meant the world to me! That jacket and shirt are original works of art. I would have been happy to hang on to them, and still yearn for them during my cookbook events, but they really did need to be in the Obama Center’s permanent collection.”
Noyes, 69, gained national acclaim in a 2008 New York Times roundup of “thrifty indulgences” for mail-order food after Marian Burros hailed his “deft hand with pastries and an unerring sense of flavor balance.” A whopping 57,000 website hits that day changed his life.
He quit his job art directing the Washington Post magazine and tapped his savings. He was soon baking fulltime in the farmhouse he shared with his future husband, architect Dwight McNeill, in rural Orlean, Va., and selling his wares at a nearby market.
A fifth-generation Northern Californian, Noyes honed his baking chops during childhood visits to his paternal grandmother in North Carolina and an uncle in Florida, later augmented by rigorous classes at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY; L’Academie de Cuisine in Bethesda, Md., and an internship with chef Rick Bayless in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Noyes also credits a note taped to the kitchen door of “a grubby little Southern diner decades ago: ‘They’ll like dinner but will remember dessert.’ That pushed me away from my desk to jump into professional culinary training. I like making pies, some fun sweets, nothing fussy but more rustic. I think that’s where the charm is.”
By 2023, after publishing “The Red Truck Bakery Farmhouse Cookbook,” he sold the business to Marshall restaurateurs Neal and Star Wavra, including his beloved 1954 scarlet Ford-100 pickup, bought at auction from fashion mogul Tommy Hilfiger.
Today Noyes is writing “Pie in the Sky,” a memoir starting in California, with its deep agrarian and culinary traditions, followed by countless food-inspired road trips and a string of art directing jobs from Houston and Tampa to New York and DC.
This fall, he’ll open Hayfields General Store & Café in the tiny, toney hamlet of Washington, Va., dubbed “Little Washington” to distinguish it from the nation’s capital 70 miles to the northeast. He already bought a shiny yellow 1920 Ford farm truck, adding license plates proclaiming, “GOT PIE.”
Yet Noyes still calls himself an art director who became a baker. “That first artsy creative career of 30 years influenced this newer career—creating a personality and identity for a charming destination food joint: a design project for me, not for a publisher or client. Launching a bakery has been, well, icing on the cake.”
Last year he and McNeill sold the Orlean farmhouse to buy and restore a 1920s home, complete with a graveyard, in Little Washington. “I realized there’s nowhere within walking distance to have a casual, comforting meal with friends, or on the fly, that didn’t break the bank,” he said, referring to the very pricey, world-famous Inn at Little Washington that currently boasts two Michelin stars (down from three).
There was also nowhere to buy kitchen staples—local organic produce, proteins and coffee beans—enjoy breakfast or lunch, and pick up creative carryout for family meals or a dinner party. Noyes will feature his favorite soups, sandwiches, and baked goods, including “classic church lady cakes.” His 1,700 square-foot space in the spanking new Rush River Commons will be anchored by a communal table seating nearly two dozen, perfect for the monthly Sunday night family suppers he has planned.
“The locals want it and need it, and I’m right there with them. I’m doing this for all of us,” said Noyes. “And I miss being the smiling face of a business, laughing and yakking with the customers.”
Annie Groer has been a Washington Post and Orlando Sentinel reporter and columnist, and a presidential debate panelist whose work has appeared in numerous print, broadcast, and digital outlets . She twice represented DC in the National Chicken Cooking Contest.