It’s the catholic embrace of high and low, and a sensibility that says too much ain’t enough. Most of all, it’s a love of tradition in a place with hundreds of years of history and a long history of loss.

These are, then, more than pies. Four months after Hurricane Katrina, when the Hubig’s trucks started making deliveries again and the little packages with their images of “Savory Simon” in his extravagant toque began showing up in stores, it was cause for celebration. The pies are so closely associated with the city, its suffering and its renewal that in the first episode of “Treme,” the studiedly precise HBO series set in New Orleans, a restaurateur whose kitchen cannot come up with any of the desserts on the menu pulls a Hubig’s pie out of her purse and gets the chef to fancy it up for a customer. (Locals carped that the bakery had not reopened at the time portrayed in the episode, stretching the boundaries of accuracy, if not shelf life.)

The bakery sat in converted stables on Dauphine Street on a quiet block in the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood. The Fire Department said the blaze began in the center of the building, “in an area called the fry room, and spread quickly.” Thirty-two fire trucks responded to the blaze.

Charles Parent, the fire chief, recalled in an interview with the television station WDSU that the company gave unsold pies to firefighters and police officers in the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina, and so they felt the loss keenly. “Our guys put this out with their tears,” he said.

No one was injured in the fire, and that was the most important thing, said Lamar Bowman, the company’s president. Mr. Bowman said he had received calls of condolence and support from across the nation, and he pledged that this latest setback would not be the end of Hubig’s.