Oprah's Company Said She Hadn't Bought the Pies. Then Oprah Called the Cape Cod Times.

CENTERVILLE · ROUTE 28

In August 2009, the count was 20. Kristin Broadley said she'd delivered a chicken pot pie to Oprah Winfrey's traveling party, then filled two more orders: chicken, custard and banana cream, 20 pies in all.

In December 2017, the count was 40. "We worked right through the night and made 40 pies," Laurie Bowen told the Boston Globe, and the pair drove them to a private jet at Hyannis airport.

Those two numbers could both be true of one busy week, or one of them could have grown in the retelling, the way a good Cape story does. Nothing published reconciles them, and we can't settle it. But the 20 has an odd distinction: it ran in the same story that said Winfrey's own company had denied she bought any.

If you've driven Route 28 through Centerville, you've passed the address where all of this started. Which raises a fair question. How does a shop that was five months old get into an argument with Harpo?

Broadley trained as a chef at Johnson and Wales and then, a 2011 Patch post says, spent 16 years in banking. "I was bored…..and done with banking," she said. Bowen, a Cape native with more than 25 years in the restaurant business by that account, was also a former deputy sheriff.

They opened on March 9, 2009, per the Patch piece. The Globe says Broadley used a small inheritance to buy the space at 1671 Falmouth Road.

Five months later, she heard Winfrey was in town.

Winfrey and Gayle King had come for Eunice Kennedy Shriver's funeral and were staying at a local inn, the Globe reported. Broadley went over. "I brought over a chicken pie and a peach pie to Oprah with a note," she told the paper, and she left her home phone number with it.

"By the time I drove home, Oprah and [BFF] Gayle King were on the speaker phone with me," Broadley told the Globe. King later asked for warm pies for the flight and frozen ones for home.

Then came the denial. A spokeswoman for Winfrey's production company said she hadn't bought pies from the shop during her trip, CBS News reported.

Then Winfrey called the Cape Cod Times herself, on a Wednesday, and confirmed it. "The pie-gate escapade actually did happen," she said.

CBS published that on Aug. 20, 2009. Think about what that means for a shop on Route 28. A talk show mogul, as CBS put it, has personally telephoned the local paper to say it happened.

Broadley said a mention on King's radio show sparked a flood of orders, CBS reported. By her account in 2011, some customers waited eight weeks for a pie. In 2017 Winfrey named the chicken pie one of her "favorite things" in O Magazine, the Globe said, the third time the bakery had the honor, after 2009 and 2012.

The next part isn't about Oprah. By 2011, the Patch post said, the company made most of its pies at a location of Cape Abilities, the nonprofit that supports people with disabilities on the Cape, and its Cape Abilities workforce had grown from five to 40. The Globe counted about 30 employees in 2017, roughly 10 of them adults with disabilities, and about 5,000 pies sold that Thanksgiving.

Those are dated numbers, and we can't tell you today's. What we can tell you is what's posted. The shop's locations page lists 1671 Falmouth Road, Monday through Saturday, 8 AM to 5 PM. Its Goldbelly listing ships a Thanksgiving Pie, a savory turkey pie with cranberry-studded stuffing, 9 inches, for 6 to 8, frozen and unbaked, at $79.95. That's the shipping price, not the counter price. Our Thanksgiving guide notes that the shop's 2026 menu doesn't give an order deadline.

So don't wait on the internet for one. Email or call the shop this week, and ask the only question that matters: by when?

Sources: CBS News, Aug. 20, 2009; The Boston Globe via Boston.com, Dec. 15, 2017; Patch, Oct. 12, 2011; Centerville Pie Company; Goldbelly.