In Round Top, Texas, antique hunting comes with a delicious distraction: a pie shop tucked beneath oak trees on Henkel Square. Royers Pie Haven offers a place to stop for coffee, a slice, and a break from browsing. Its appeal is straightforward, but its story stretches from a family café to a separate bakery business with shipping, a nearby production kitchen, and a founder known as “The Pie Queen.”
Tara Royer Steele didn’t build the business around an overnight viral moment. She grew up working in her family’s restaurant, learned pie-making alongside her parents, and opened Pie Haven in 2011 for customers who wanted dessert without a full café meal. A New Bakery Brings European-Style Pastries and Coffee to Downtown DallasRound Top already drew antique shoppers and weekend visitors, giving the bakery an audience beyond town residents. The shop offered those visitors something specific: somewhere to slow down over pie and coffee.
The distinction between the businesses matters. Royers Pie Haven is not the original Royers Round Top Café, which Steele’s family took over in 1987. Country Living reported in October 2025 that Steele and her husband owned Pie Haven and the Bake Shop in nearby Brenham, while her brother and sister-in-law ran the café. The shared family history explains the name, but the bakery has its own origin and reasons customers keep coming back.
A Family Café Supplied the First Slice of the Story
When Steele’s family arrived in Round Top, she was 12, and the café offered only two pies: apple and buttermilk. Her parents changed the menu, but the pies stayed as the business grew. Eventually, the supplier couldn’t keep up with demand, so the family started making the desserts themselves. “So really, we didn’t pick pie. God just picked pie for us,” Steele told Country Living.
A friend provided her grandmother’s pie-crust recipe, and the family began experimenting with fillings. One early success came from adapting a chocolate-chip-cookie recipe and putting it inside a pie crust. “That’s how my dad started the Bud’s Chocolate Chip, which is what we call the claim to fame,” Steele said. It was a practical example of the approach that would become central to the business: recognizable desserts, reworked with a playful twist.
Steele’s own interest in baking started earlier. On Pie Haven’s website, she recalls making homemade bread and cookies as a child and delivering them to church on Sundays. Later, working at the café gave her experience beyond the oven: she waited tables after school and learned the business alongside her family. When the opportunity for a separate shop appeared, the bakery dream had decades of personal experience behind it.
That opportunity arrived in July 2011 at a local chamber-of-commerce meeting. Steele heard about a new development in town, arranged to meet the property owners and said yes when they asked whether she wanted a pie shop. The timing was deliberate because the antiques crowds were approaching. “We opened the HAVEN on SEPT. 16, 2011…yes, only 2 months later!!!” she wrote in the bakery’s account of its beginnings.
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A Small Shop Found Its Place in a Bigger Weekend
Round Top’s visitor economy made the idea work. The antiques show began in 1968, and Steele recalled families from Houston building second homes around the town, people her family called “weekenders.” Pie Haven did not have to invent a reason for everyone to visit Round Top. Instead, it fitted into an existing outing, giving shoppers and travelers a destination for a dessert break.
The shop also answered a specific gap in the family’s restaurant business. The Houston Chronicle described Pie Haven as an offshoot for café fans who wanted a slice and coffee. Its setting under the oaks reinforced that less formal purpose, while Steele’s antique and vintage finds gave it a connection to the surrounding shopping scene. The draw wasn’t just what arrived on the plate; it was a place designed for lingering.
Smallness brought limits, but also character. Steele told Country Living that a 400-square-foot pie shop could not accommodate every recipe she wanted to offer. Customers resisted seeing favorites leave the menu, while she wanted room for new creations. “When it’s small and you don’t have a lot of space, you use what you have,” she said. “And it’s part of the experience, the ambiance of being small.”
Her answer was to keep the business’s identity focused. Even additions such as muffins carried pie-inspired names and flavors, including Junkberry Pie Muffin and Pecan Pie Muffin. Her 2025 cookbook, Keep Your Fork, There’s Pie!, gave a home to recipes that couldn’t all fit in the shop. “Stick to what we do well. Right? So do that one thing and do it well, and that’s pies,” Steele said.
The Crowds Mattered but So Did the Community
The antiques traffic was financially significant, not merely a picturesque backdrop. In June 2020, the Houston Chronicle reported that the fair accounted for 25% of Steele’s annual sales. Before that spring’s event was canceled because of the pandemic, she had prepared 2,000 pies, 1,500 empty pie shells and thousands of other baked goods. Those figures show how closely the bakery’s operation was connected to the town’s busiest visitor periods.
With those crowds suddenly gone, Steele used her Brenham commercial kitchen to prepare family meals, alongside curbside sales and other business changes. “We had to reinvent ourselves kind of really quickly,” she told the Chronicle. “What would serve us well and what would serve our community?” The excess pies eventually sold over three months, although the report made clear that the new ventures did not replace all the lost festival revenue.
That experience also put her in contact with residents she hadn’t met before. “I’ve lived in the area for over 30 years, and most of the people I’ve met through this, I’ve never met in my entire life,” she said. “I just love how food brings people together.” It adds an important dimension to the destination story: visitors helped support the business, but local connections became another source of purpose.
For anyone planning a weekend stop, Pie Haven lists its address as 190 Henkel Street, with regular Saturday hours of 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday hours of 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Check for updates before traveling, particularly around special events. The bakery’s lasting idea is hospitality, expressed through a modest proposition: good pie, coffee and somewhere to sit. As Steele told Country Living, “It’s pure joy. It’s a little heaven on earth.”
