The dish: Pumpkin Pie Okay, so this isn’t your traditional pumpkin pie. In fact, Go Cakes refers to it as “Not Your Usual Pumpkin Pie.” It’s an accurate way of describing this ingenious cake/tart/pie hybrid by founder Stephanie Fong, who once trained with Instagram’s most revered pastry chef, Amaury Guichon, and turns out delicate, delicious, Asian-inflected desserts from her San Marino shop. Beautifully decorated, like all of Fong’s creations, this “pie” is a symphony of taste and texture.

Founded by Taiwanese-Americans Alice Cherng and Belinda Wei, Dear Bella is a plant-based ice cream shop that churns out some of the most superior scoops in the city. After tinkering with recipes for years, the friends developed an extraordinary vegan base with a creamy consistency that mimics dairy-based ice cream.

You heard it here first: ice cream pies are taking over. For those who prefer frozen desserts over baked pastries, Sweet Rose Creamery has you covered with its festive Apple Ice Cream Pie. A celebration of seasonal, local produce, the pie’s made completely from scratch with See Canyon’s orchard-fresh fruit. A graham cracker cookie crust is filled with apple pie ice cream, apple pie filling, and a caramel swirl before it’s crowned with a very generous oat crumble, and even more caramel sauce.

This Downtown LA bake shop has been churning out fresh, homemade pies since 1956 and has been owned by the same family for three generations. Now it’s led by Olympic Gold Medalist and former head coach of the U.S. Olympic women's track and field team, Jeanette Bolden-Pickens, her husband Al, and her sister Denise, who use the same recipes passed down from their grandfather. The bakery holds the title of the largest sweet potato pie manufacturer on the West Coast.

Catarah Coleman and Shoneji Robison founded Southern Girl Desserts in 2007, drawing from family recipes to create a specifically Southern-inspired bake shop with hospitality to match. You might recognize the pair from Food Network’s Cupcake Wars, where they took home the grand prize. The menu spans cupcakes, pound and bundt cakes, cookies, “pudding and thangs,” plus pies and custom desserts, but their Sweet Potato Pecan Pie is the perfect option for the holidays.

Lawyer-turned-piemaker Brianna Abrams grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where all the women in her family—including her great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, and sister—baked together for every occasion. When she moved to Los Angeles and took in the abundance of fresh fruit at local farmers markets, Abrams was inspired enough to ditch the courthouse and start churning out her now-famous crusts.

Helmed by Nicole Rucker, a former pastry chef at the Gjelina Group, Fat + Flour doesn’t overwhelm you with too many choices. Instead, Rucker executes a handful of flavors exceptionally well from her tiny pie shop tucked inside Grand Central Market. This year, she’s ditching traditional pumpkin in favor of a few inventive creations—including a sensational Coffee Cream Pie dreamt up by Fat + Four baker Molly Donnellon.

Housed in a distinctive, cottage-style building, this family-owned and operated Los Feliz icon has been turning out pies and brewing coffees since 1969. In California, it’s the sole survivor of the original, wide-ranging House of Pies franchise. Their recipe for success hasn’t changed much: stellar customer service and a reasonably priced menu chock-full of diner-style offerings like burgers, pancakes, and sandwiches. But the fresh-baked pies are by far the main attraction.

This cozy, homey, rustic coffee shop in the NoHo Arts District is the sort of place where you dream about writing an award-winning script or the next Great American Novel—fueled by a cup of good coffee and a slice of heaven. All of their butter-crust pies are made small-batch by hand to ensure quality, so you can’t go wrong with any flavor. But there’s nothing like their old-fashioned Lemon Meringue—with its cool, custardy filling and sweet-and-tangy balance—to inspire your creativity.

The Apple Pan turns out pies as classic, familiar, and unpretentious as the legendary Los Angeles institution itself. While there’s nothing quite like digging into a slice at their crowded U-shaped counter on Pico, their pies taste just as good at home. We go for the rich, gooey, baked-fresh-daily Pecan Pie—which is made using an original family recipe that Ellen Baker (who founded the diner along with her husband Allan in 1947) brought with her from Nebraska.

This gourmet pie shop, which makes both sweet and savory slices to equal acclaim, started off in Los Angeles and has since grown to six locations in Southern California and three international outposts. All of its flavors—like Salted Caramel Pecan and Pumpkin—have been fine-tuned to perfection, but none showcases the restaurant’s fun, experimental approach quite like the Earl Grey Tea Pie.

Since first opening in 1938, Du-par’s at The Original Farmers Market has enjoyed a well-earned reputation for the city’s best pies. But there’s something about their crowd-pleasing, classic apple pie, which sports an impressive towering canopy that evokes warm, fuzzy childhood memories of mom baking in the kitchen (even if your mom never baked in the kitchen). Like the rest of their baked goods, it’s made from scratch using premium ingredients—starting with sweet and tart Granny Smith apples.

Santa Barbara-based scoop shop McConnell’s limited-edition pie is back by popular demand—featuring its signature pumpkin ice cream loaded into a scrumptious brown butter shortbread cookie crust, drizzled with salted caramel sauce, and studded with sweet pecan pralines. The star of this 11-inch pie is the creamery’s seasonal flavor—a puree of roasted pumpkin accented with cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and allspice, then stirred into California Central Coast grass-fed milk and cream.

This burger joint only slings a few, curated items, but it does every single thing on its menu well—including a magnificent Key Lime Pie (the vote’s split between that and their equally good Banana Cream). A secret family recipe of Lysa Heslov, a filmmaker and philanthropist who’s a longtime friend of HiHo co-founder Jerry Greenberg, it’s made from scratch using old-fashioned techniques. The beauty of this slice lies in its utter simplicity.