09/02/2026
There are two pie stops on that stretch of 61 and locals have a preference.
Betty's is the famous one. It's been there since 1956, the pie is good, and everybody knows the name. That's exactly the problem. On a July Saturday the lot is full, the wait is real, and you're eating pie in a room full of people who pulled off the highway because a sign told them to.
The Rustic Inn in Two Harbors is the better stop, and it's better for reasons that have nothing to do with snobbery.
The building is a log roadhouse that started as a stagecoach stop in the 1920s. Log walls, low ceilings, a wood stove, mounted animals, a pie case by the register positioned as an act of psychological warfare. It feels like the North Shore instead of feeling like a business about the North Shore.
The pie holds up against anybody. Bumbleberry, sour cream raisin, rhubarb custard, blueberry, banana cream with meringue stacked high enough to lean. Crusts made in-house. The case empties out by afternoon in summer, which tells you what you need to know.
And it's a real cafe, not a pie counter. Breakfast all day, wild rice soup, walleye, burgers. You can sit for an hour with a coffee and nobody moves you along.
That's the whole case. Same quality of pie, better room, better pace, fewer people who are only there once.
Get pie at both over a summer. Then tell me which one you'd drive back to.
