Betty’s Pies in Two Harbors

There’s a stretch of Highway 61 between Duluth and the Canadian border where you never lose sight of Lake Superior for very long. The north shore has been drawing people north for generations, for the water, the agates, the pines, the particular light bouncing off golden leaves on a clear October morning. And for a long time, it drew them to a weathered café just outside Two Harbors, where a woman named Betty Lessard was up at three in the morning making pie and donuts.

Betty’s Pies essentially started in 1956 as a fish shack that Betty’s father, Aleck, built by the Stewart River for a friend of the family to sell smoked fish from. Betty thought the fishermen stopping in might appreciate something sweet, so she added donuts and coffee. Then hamburgers. Then pie. 

In 1958, Betty’s Café was born. It didn’t take long for word of the homemade food and the pies (oh, the pies!) to spread. By the time Betty sold the place in 1984, her café was as much a reason to drive the North Shore as the lake itself.

Betty Lessard was not a formally trained baker. She learned from doing and somewhere along the way, realized dessert was the most important part of any meal. She wouldn’t even plan a dinner party menu until she knew what she was serving last. 

She got up at 4:30 in the morning to bake a hundred pies on Sundays, fifty or sixty on weekdays, along with rye bread and cookies. Everything from scratch, always. Butter, lard, real whipped cream. No shortcuts.

I stopped at Betty’s a lot with my grandma when I was young, and sometimes with my parents. We sat at one of the long picnic tables alongside strangers and had lunch and pie on our way up the shore. I don’t ever remember what we ordered, but I remember the feeling. It was the kind of restaurant that made you feel like you’d stopped somewhere special and that your taste buds were in for a treat.

Betty’s is still there, still drawing the faithful off the highway. Most North Shore regulars and locals will tell you without much prompting that the place was never the same without Betty’s guidance. The name remains, but the old feeling of the place is harder to find.