A Tiny Takeout Window Sells Some of the Tastiest Pies in San Jose

A small red building in San Jose’s Willow Glen neighborhood is a laboratory for unbridled culinary experimentation. At Sweetdragon Baking Company, nut brittles are filled with potato chips, pies are loaded with Japanese curry, and sweet-and-savory bacon cookies are spiked with Jack Daniels.

A mural in front of the building provides a sneak peek into the bakery’s whimsical approach to recipe development: A dragon in a white chef’s toque whisks a bowl of batter while several animal friends bustle about measuring out ingredients for some unknown masterpiece.

Hway-ling Hsu started Sweetdragon in 2010 after over a decade of working as a lawyer in New York and San Jose. “After my youngest was finished with high school, I thought I should see if anyone will buy something I cook,” Hsu recalls. As it turns out, a lot of people were interested, and in 2020 she started selling her pies and brittles out of a pickup window she refers to as “the pie hole.” What started as a COVID safety precaution remains today: The window is a quick, fun way to get customers their baked goods.

These days, Hsu bakes 700 pies a week. One of Sweetdragon’s busiest days of the year is Pi Day (March 14), when foodies and math enthusiasts celebrate the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter by increasing the width of their waistline — through the act of gobbling down some pie, of course. Hsu says it’s like a mini Thanksgiving, with customers lining up before the bakery opens.

Sweetdragon’s signature Pi Day special is a guava cheesecake pie with a pi symbol made out of crust in the center. That pie is already sold out for Friday, but it’s still available for preorder (with or without the pi symbol) for the rest of March. For customers just walking up to the window on Pi Day, other available specials will include pistachio-vanilla brittle cookies, flourless orange tortes and, hopefully, a brand new orange cream pie Hsu is hoping she’ll have ready in time to debut.

Sweetdragon’s most popular pies are its chicken pot pie and seasonal fruit options such as apple, cherry and strawberry. But the real fun is trying all the new, experimental flavors that pop up on the menu.

“Someone will say, ‘Oh, I wonder if this would taste good. Or, look at that thing over there — would that be good for pie? And then we try it,” says Hsu.

Through trial and error, she discovered that strawberry pies work best when made using a blend of dried and fresh strawberries. “This keeps pies from exploding, intensifies the flavor and does not create big pools of starchy goo,” says Hsu. “Win-win!” She also remedied an overly beige taro pie by adding a touch of purple yam. The brighter color wound up boosting sales.

Of course, not all experiments are a success. “I didn’t seem able to make the almond brittle without burning it,” says Hsu. “I’m not a professional cook, and it took me a while to figure out that a lower flame would work better.” To her surprise, people loved the flavor of burnt almond, so she kept it as a permanent item. She’s learned to lean into the risks associated with experimentation and even found a way to share the baked goods that don’t quite make the cut: “Now, when we do experiments, if something comes out a little bit exploded or the wrong shape, we’ll just have that for our ‘oops box.’” Everything in the box is sold at a discounted price.

Sweetdragon also makes pies in collaboration with other South Bay food businesses. The filling for the Japanese chicken curry pie, for example, is made by Mogu Curry, a local popup. She has also featured fillings from San Jose favorites Barya Kitchen and Hết Sẩy.

Meanwhile, Hsu’s brittle recipe development is even more impressive than the pies. When she started, she had no idea how to make this confection and consulted a PhD chemical engineer — her husband — for advice. Brittle-making is finicky and involves breaking down table sugar (sucrose) into fructose and glucose before adding baking soda to make tiny bubbles. Those bubbles become the pores in the candy, providing its characteristic brittle texture.

“Making brittle is still tricky,” says Hsu. “I think it’s because there’s a lot of variables. Even if you have the same amount in the pot every time, the ambient air temperature, the humidity, whether there’s a little breeze — all those things seem to have an effect.” Now that she’s mastered the technique, she’s able to get funky with it, conjuring brittles filled with nontraditional ingredients like potato chips, pretzels, beer, serrano chiles and chicharron.

Hsu’s brittle doesn’t stick to the crevices of your teeth or bind your mouth shut; instead, it shatters with even the gentlest bite. Each variety has its own unique texture dependent on its fillings, and an idiosyncratic quality that comes from making each small batch by hand. And Hsu makes constant adjustments too. She recalls a pharmaceutical-engineer-turned-cake-baker who told her that in both medicine and baking, you can’t just make indefinitely larger batches without changing the formula.

It seems, then, that the secret formula at Sweetdragon is that there isn’t one. But if something has the potential to taste delicious encased in brittle, you can be certain that Hsu will find a way to make it happen.

Sweetdragon is open Wednesday to Saturday 9 a.m.–5 p.m. at 898 Lincoln Ave. in San Jose. Pi Day 2025 is Friday, March 14.