How Crust Issues Evolved from a Local Takeout Spot to Destination Dining
When John Nealon opened Crust Issues, three years ago, he wondered if he’d be able to pay the electric bill each month.
He knew going in that giving it another go as an owner after Fortina and after Taco Daddy, The Lila Rose, and Cugine’s Italian, that the restaurant game is a gamble. And he was already up against it by taking a lease across the street from Bob’s Discount Furniture, next to a car wash, and in a spot in a strip mall next to a hair salon, a tattoo parlor, and an adult novelty store.
Oh, and the parking there, it sucks.
Crust Issues’ menu has grown tenfold since it opened in 2023 to include more pizza combinations, cutlets, sandwiches, wings, and pastas, like this scarp pasta.
Hot sauce + sausage pizza w/sausage, verde hot sauce, mozzarella and parmesan cheeses, red onion, and parsley
But Nealon’s early mornings slaving over his dough recipe wouldn’t be for nothing. He kept at it and kept pushing, daring to create pizza, pasta, and sandwich combinations that not many others would attempt.
Mozzarella sticks on pizza? Alright, that’s not THAT farfetched.
The Hamburglar, which is basically a Big Mac in pizza form, isn’t that insane either.
Chicken cutlet with pimento cheese and a Peruvian-like green sauce? OK, we’re warming up.
It gets crazier, just keep reading.
But something else Nealon leaned into in conjunction with his creative brain is social media, something he’s always been adept at, even at his past restaurants.
Crust Issues’ eclectic, pop culture-y, weird, funny Instagram account, now at over 110,000 followers, is something Nealon focused on as an owner who simultaneously runs operations, cooks, chats with customers, and he’ll even take your order and bus your table, too.
What started as one thing, is now something else entirely, in terms of menu, supper clubs (yes, plural), and popularity. But yeah, sure, you can still get a cheese pizza.
Nealon poses with his son, Jack, at one of Crust Issues’ supper club nights.
It’s usually a full house come weekends! 
“I remember looking out at the dining room in that first year to six guys, sitting at six tables, all on their lunch break,” Nealon recalls. “Now, it’s like moms and kids, people on dates, people traveling from other states, (people celebrating) birthdays and anniversaries. I’m always blown away when people travel to come here. I remember a Boston couple came in. They heard about us and Hindsight BBQ, and they had been following us for a while. And three hipsters from Rome, NY came all the way here. It’s crazy, but that’s truly the power of the media we live in.”
And they’re coming for many reasons.
Maybe it’s the chopped Italian combo, stuffed between “bread” that’s folded over pizza dough with cheese, herbs, and pepperoni baked into the top of the “bun.”
Maybe it’s for the thick mozzarella sticks with tangy, spicy scarpariello sauce.
Perhaps it’s for a house salad but with three big, saucy, marinara covered meatballs on top.
Pizza Hut’s Supreme could never be this. 
Mega, extra crispy slices are now a thing, too, if you ask nicely.
It could be their crispy, cheesy edged pan pizzas, a staple since day one, that now includes their own versions of a Pizza Hut Supreme and California Pizza Kitchen’s BBQ chicken pies and others like chicken tinga, or meatballs, vodka sauce, aji, and parm.
“Chilaquiles pizza is just an idea we had, but It’s not like, let’s do this for social media,” Nealon says. “We just knew it was gonna be fucking good. Fritos is a fun choice because I’m almost always gonna go with Fritos. It wins. Those corn chips are engineered to be good bites. I think throwing those on top is fun for the right person, but I know it also bothers some people, which I like, too.”
Chilaquiles – avocado, tomatillo, Fritos, green sauce, mozzarella On the expanded menu, that, let’s face it, was available, just not printed before, Nealon says: “I want people to feel like you can order (the stuff) off this menu and not feel like you’re in a pizzeria, but pizza is still the most important thing we do here.”
Chopped Italian combo! 
What’s also responsible for all of Crust Issues’ off-the-wall creations is a supper club that debuted in 2024 on Saturday evenings for $40, including beer and wine.
At this weekly dinner event, dish out fun menu of things you couldn’t order on a normal day. To reserve, potential guests had to send them a direct message on Instagram to secure a table.
Some of the dishes served at the supper club ended up on the permanent menu and others went away, never to be seen again, and aside from it being something fun for his customers to attend, it was also great for research and development purposes.
The supper club (now offered Wednesday through Sunday because of its popularity) and the general experimentation that goes on at Crust Issues, has even had a hand in impacting the regular menu so much that customers are showing up to order things that they see on Instagram.
“We don’t do anything viral to be viral, but I’ve been doing this long enough that I know what might go viral,” Nealon says. “I was at The Cottage with my wife and we had their wagyu brisket bao buns with this beautiful jet-black condiment. We do a lot with cutlets, especially at the supper club, and we’ve done queso dips as the finisher sauce for the cutlets, so the thought was, if we do a cutlet with black garlic, it’ll freak a lot of people out, but it’ll be delicious. It’s not necessarily to do food that will go viral, but having an awareness of what might. It’s all random. It doesn’t always do well. It might have a five percent success rate of doing numbers.”
The supper club has even forced a menu update to avoid the confusion of people stopping in, not seeing Crust Issues’ versions of Spaghetti O’s, pastina, chopped sandwiches, and new pizzas listed, and wondering whether they could order it or not.
“It’s (supper club) has brought the pastina out, the Spaghetti O’s out, and now people are calling up and asking for that stuff that they had at the supper club or saw on Instagram,” Nealon says. “I just thought it would be fun to eat, the nostalgia of it. Mike (Stramandinoli) worked on the vodka sauce for like six weeks to get it to where it is. We have a bunch of sauces that we try 3-4 different ways and they either go away forever or they make it on the menu. The opening menu rarely even sells dishes for us anymore. People come in and they’re ordering Spaghetti O’s or the Italian combo even though it wasn’t listed on the menu. Pizzas from supper clubs have become part of our rotations. The chopped Italian was just a silly idea. It had to be on the menu. We had to update it, even though we liked the aspect of you have to know about it to order it. It’s silly that when people come in because they’ve been told they have to try Crust Issues, that they don’t see that stuff listed. It was time to show that on the menu and show people that what we do, we do it really, really well.”
“The supper club’s forced us to be more creative than if we didn’t have it,” Nealon says. “I get bored easily and that forces you to keep it interesting creating a new menu every week. We write menus in a silly way. Like, Jared Sippel was in here from L’Ostal and he was writing his menu for New Years Eve and it was like looking at blueprints if you were at like Boeing, like top secret stuff. We get there different. We have a text thread between me and Mike. Most of it’s just, ‘I have this idea, what do you think?’ Sometimes it doesn’t work.” Stramandinoli has added some old school flair amongst Crust Issues’ new school creativity with escarole and beans, bread and broth, different pesto sauces, and a vodka sauce that took him over a month to nail down. Meatballs and salad? If you grew up in an Italian household, you 100% mixed your red sauce into your greens. 
And there’s more evolution.
On Saturday mornings, they’ve started a breakfast club with bagels being the feature, and it’s something Nealon wanted to do for the past few years. The idea came to him since he was already in the restaurant early in the morning making dough, thinking, “Why aren’t we open right now?” And he already learned how to make Jerusalem style bagels from a baker friend of his, Amit.
“Breakfast is a natural extension of the supper club,” Nealon says. “Breakfast is still only thing I cook at home and it’s my favorite thing I do with my family, almost exclusively Sundays because that’s the day I’m with my kids and my wife. I spent the first year being here at an ungodly hour before 5 a.m. until 9 p.m. and always thought it was crazy we weren’t open. I just couldn’t get anyone to come in that early to justify doing it. It’s supposed to be fun; Sunny D mimosas. breakfast pizza, a stuffed bagel, a version of cinnamon roll, a fun fried egg. We did Mexican inspired birria potatoes with green sauce. There might be French toast, some kind of breakfast meat. It’s still evolving. The lynchpin are the stuffed bagels. So far, we’ve done scallion cream cheese, vodka sauce cream cheese. What pizza is to our regular menu, bagels are to this. I know there’s people out there looking for this. I’ve spent lot of time in the south and there’s a higher bar there for breakfast. A lot of top people in this industry haven’t cracked that breakfast code and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, but we’re giving it a shot.”
Early on, Crust Issues is doing one breakfast club tasting per week on Saturday mornings at 11 (also for $40/person) and if people dig it, there’s a real shot they’ll add additional times or days.
Apart from the breakfast tasting, though, some breakfast pizzas, stromboli, and stuffed everything, plain, and sesame bagels will be offered a la carte.
The goal here, according to Nealon, is finally acknowledging that Crust Issues is a restaurant.
When they opened, Nealon says Crust Issues was 90 percent takeout, but that’s gone down to 60 percent since more people have been dining in because of the supper club and that it’s become both a neighborhood spot and one that people travel to despite the limited parking and admittedly super casual service.
There’s always a different tres leches for a sweet ending. Some of those have been strawberry crunch (like the Good Humor Strawberry Shortcake bars), an ode to Carvel with those chocolate crunchies, funfetti, pancake, Fruity Pebbles, and the list goes on.
“No one’s coming to your table and it’s not gonna be some 22-year-old girl screaming, ‘WELCOME TO CRUST ISSUES!!! Can I get you some water?!’” he says. “That’s never gonna happen. No one’s asking you if you want coffee or dessert after. But you’re gonna have an excellent restaurant food quality meal. I’m still serving entrées on paper plates and you still gotta walk up to the counter to order. We’re not chasing certain things like needing a fish dish on the menu or saying we need new salads. I don’t give a fuck about that. It’s a collection of dishes that are satisfying, comforting, delicious, tasty, whatever you want to say. And there’s pizza involved, and bagels now, and for some reason we have tres leches cake. There’s no one else you’re gonna interact with except the people who are cooking your food. Everyone wants to open a neighborhood spot, we just weren’t capable of executing it, but now we’re that much closer to doing so. You wanna be happy? Have a good meal? Come here. Try a cutlet, a mozz stick with scarp sauce, and the new pizza.”
Nealon, though, arguably happier, and more creative than he’s ever been, continues, gratefully.
“A pizzeria is what I want to be doing, ultimately. It’s very satisfying to me in the restaurant world and in my career, like, hey, I’m gonna do this every day kind of deal. If you want a cheese pizza, you can get that. We have talented people working here who care and we keep cooking food that we want to eat and that we genuinely enjoy. If you come here, I promise you, you’ll have a really enjoyable, delicious meal.”
60 Connecticut Ave #3530, Norwalk
203.939.7171, Instagram @crustissues203
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