Carlin's Pies Wants to Deliver All Your Meat and Pastry Needs

“I’ve been a chef and restaurant owner, originally in Melbourne, for 36 years,” Chris Carlin, entrepreneur and founder of Carlin's pies, tells us. “I came to Beijing just over three years ago and started a restaurant serving Western food in Changying, east Beijing. We kept trying to find things that worked with Chinese clients and finally found the pie niche. We started selling them to expats, now we also send our pies to Shanghai, Wuxi, Shandong, and lots of other areas in China, to expats and to Chinese customers.”

My family each picked a pie to try: chunky beef and cheese, Mexican chili, Italian saged lamb, and the Aussie meat pie, although we also couldn’t resist finding out what a bacon and egg pie might behold, as well as what makes Carlin's ham and cheese pasty so hugely popular.

I had hoped to serve them with chips; not french fries, but proper English chips, big, fat, and seasoned with salt and vinegar. As is so often the case though, the potatoes from our local supermarket weren’t up to chipping, so we went for the traditional mash instead, with stir-fried leeks, beans, and asparagus. An Aussie wine seemed the only appropriate choice, so we plumped for a merlot, not wanting to overwhelm the more subtle flavor of lamb.

The lamb was indeed flavorsome, the chunks tender and the herbs well-judged. It was the meat pie, however, that gave me a Proustian moment, where I flashed back to the pies of my childhood. The pastry is firmer than that of 2 Guys and a Pie, crumbly rather than soft; which style you prefer is a matter of taste. It was the filling though, rich and utterly satisfying, which brought a nostalgic mist to my eyes.

The bacon and egg pie turned out to be nothing more exotic than a quiche lorraine – which at least explained the comment on the menu that “real men would eat this.” It was certainly a robust and manly take on the recipe. And it was easy to see why it was easy to wolf down the ham and cheese pasties, which provide two comfort foods in a handy package without all the additives a shop-bought equivalent would contain.

To sample Carlin’s tasty, affordable teatime treats for yourself, scan the QR code below:

This article originally appeared on our sister site beijingkids.

Photos: Karen Killeen