A taste for pilfered pies feeds hungry thieves

The premeditated pilfering involved pies.

Eight pies were taken from Sweet Creations pie store on Monroe Street in Germantown sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning. It was mostly pecan pies lifted from the now-empty wire racks. And a couple of sweet potato pies, too.

"I can't even be mad. It's comical," says Herman Patton, Sweet Creations co-owner

"They came in through a real hard window. It was shatterproof, so they took the whole window out. It was done very neatly," laughs Patton.

The burglars took a television set and some loose change, but that was just a crime of opportunity. Patton is thoroughly convinced that it was those tins of crusty goodness that the hungry thieves were after.

"There were no papers shuffled around, they weren't looking for anything. The register wasn't even jimmied. They crawled in and there wasn't even a crumb on the floor," he says.

"I'm telling you, it was a big pie caper. That's the only conclusion a rational human being comes up with. They must have had a team, like 'Ocean's Eleven.' " (Note: Check to see if that was George Clooney in the corner booth at the bar in Le Sel Saturday night.)

More disturbing than the pie heist itself was the getaway method.

"They hauled it off in a trash can. I'll bet they were a little stanky," Patton says, "Maybe they bagged them up first."

Though this comes on the vapors, if not the heels, of Nashville's last reported pie robbery from Arnold's Country Kitchen in January, it's too early to feed speculation of a trend.

Despite suffering the loss a day before his birthday, Patton remains mindful of what happened.

"You talk about having a good pie."

Reach Jim Myers at 615-259-8367 and on Twitter @ReadJimMyers.