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For the past 15 years, my family has had exactly three Thanksgiving rituals: a potluck dinner with the Kaye-Hsu family, morning-after turkey jook and, most important of all, a deep-dish pumpkin pie from Crixa Cakes in Berkeley. Two of the Crixa pies, preferably.
What a marvel those hefty, thick-crusted beauties were — the filling sweet but not-too-sweet and preternaturally smooth; the tender, buttery crust plentiful (as the pastry gods intended) and slightly soggy on the inside. It’s as delicious eaten on a stomach completely stuffed full of turkey and green bean casserole as it is nibbled on sneakily, a day or two later, standing in front of the fridge at midnight. I’ve gone so far as to proclaim it the greatest pumpkin pie on earth.
In their note, co-owners Zoltan Der and Elizabeth Kloian said they “no longer want to do business with [their] landlord” and won’t extend their lease when it expires at the end of the month.
It marks the end of an era, then, for one of Berkeley’s most classic food institutions. Funnily enough, as much as I love that pumpkin pie, it probably wasn’t even one of the bakery’s most famous items. If anything, the summer pies — a gooey showcase for peak-season berries and stone fruit — are even more spectacular than the pumpkin. Beyond that, Crixa is an Eastern European bakery first and foremost, specializing in hard-to-find, intricately spiced Old World delicacies like poppyseed kifli, plum-and-custard kolaches, saffron buns and kirsch-soaked vanilla chiffon cake…