7. Crust Bros w/ Matt
A meal featuring urban legends, sauce cauldrons and flummoxing formats 👻
📍 Crust Bros Waterloo, SE1 8UL
📆 7:00pm, Tuesday 11th March
Hi everyone!
Thanks for coming back. I’ve been on an unintentional hiatus for a few weeks - a mixture of needing to go to work on weekend mornings, wanting to (at least partially) relax on my mini holiday, and needing to remind myself that I’m doing this whole writing thing for fun.
Thankfully, I have completed all those things, and am especially excited for you to read about this semi-calamitous pizzeria experience. No spoilers…
This is edition number seven of the London Pizza Pal newsletter - enjoy! 🍕
THE VENUE
There exists, in the shadowy recesses of my mind, Crust Bros lore.
Not because I’ve been before (although I have, once).
It’s because I was reliably informed, years ago, that Crust Bros is a front.
Yes, it’s a functioning pizzeria. But, supposedly its primary purpose is to launder drug money. Supposedly**, they use the kitchen to cut their product. Supposedly**, that’s why for years there was only one restaurant, despite its popularity.
Do I believe this? No, obviously. Do I want to believe this? Yes, obviously.
I was keen to see what effect, if any, this had on dinner. Let’s get to it.
** I’m doubling down on the supposedlys as I don’t know a lot about libel laws but could you IMAGINE if I got sued for this? “OOoO no please Your Honour, my 9 readers are here for journalistic integrityyyyy :((( ”
Embarrassing - not worth the risk.
THE PIZZA
PRICE - 3 / 5
£10 for the yardstick Margherita, pretty good.
APPEARANCE - 2 / 5
I like to be reminded of Italy when I’m pizza-ing. That doesn’t mean I want to be presented with an amphitheatre diorama: towering walls of dough presiding over a sauce cauldron - Il Colosseo filled with gladiatorial blood.
(This tortured metaphor is trying to say it’s too doughy and the sauce ratio made me feel uncomfortable. The photo angle doesn’t do it justice, trust me).
SERVICE - 1 / 5
Uh oh.
A few things:
They make you tick your order on your paper menu like a child doing an activity sheet. Obviously, that is a terrible system and of course, our sheets got lost, meaning they had to resubmit our order half an hour later (I was forced, again, to do the same scribbling).
A second, different server eventually delivered the food, but the wrong one. An accident and not a problem - neither of us had noticed, and I can only think it was a minor cheese difference. But, it was sat on our table for a good 90 seconds or so as we took photos, before being removed by a third server. As far as I can tell was taken immediately to the intended destination. Good for anti-food waste, hygiene wise it feels pretty iffy.
A fourth different server checked if our food was okay, then a fifth. Where are these people coming from? Surely, in any dining experience, five servers is unnecessary.
A sixth server tilted their head to my eyeline and at what felt like nose-to-nose distance to ask me if I wanted Tiramisu for dessert. Colour me overwhelmed.
Mr Crust (or his brother) kindly offered to remove some money from our bill for the delays, which was much appreciated and graciously accepted. But the discount they applied was 32.3%? Again, this isn’t bad, it’s just an odd number to pick - I can only guess they were going for one third but miscalculated?
After we paid, we noticed they’d kept on and we’d paid the 12.5% service charge. I did find this, all things considered, enormously funny - get down to Crust Bros if you want a nice round 19.8% off your meal.
I do want to reiterate no one was rude and everyone was polite in these interactions. I was just like being in a slightly bewildering and never-quite-funny prank.
My conspiracy theory? A deliberate over-hiring of staff to help with ‘creative accounting’, and to try balance income from *cough* other means. SUPPOSEDLY*********
TASTE - 1.5 / 5
I’ll bite the bullet and run the risk of sounding thick: the Crust Bros pizza was too crusty.
The perimeter wall (yes, I’m persisting with the Colosseum metaphor) was dry and salty but the thin centre couldn’t hold the sauce - invariably the toppings would slop into a wet pile on the plate.
AMBIENCE - 2 / 5
At a generous estimate, the table next to us was less than a hand’s width away. The lock on the toilet also didn’t work properly, so I was walked in on with trousers pooled by my ankles (I hadn’t forgotten, I checked on my way out and the lock had the stopping power of wet cardboard).
To extrapolate on my new favourite saying, this planet is a prison, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Crust Bros have been designated guardians of said prison’s vibes.
It had to happen to someone. Crust Bros becomes the first pizzeria not to place on the shortened leaderboard. Commiserations, but based on the tale, is anyone surprised?
Thankfully, my guest and I still had a lovely time.
THE GUEST
Name: Matt
Job: Management Consultant
Last pre-pizza rendezvous: Six months ago
This is Matt!
This is in by no means a sleight, as I’m sure he would agree - Matt and I are not the best of friends.
We know each other from university, as my third year housemates were Matt’s college mates. Back then, we existed in each other’s peripheral spheres - an unknown but friendly face at events, and continuous recipients of “you’d both get on so well!” from our mutuals, though we never spent enough time together to fulfil this prophecy.
The thing I did know about Matt was that he liked football as much as I did. When, then, in the post-Covid summer of 2021 everyone was urgently scrambling to overcome the lockdown ennui, we both jumped at the chance to join our friend Marcus’ 5-a-side team.
We were the ragtag +1s in a group of people we knew we liked, but only knew tangentially. Matt and I turned out week after week for the European Super Lads (awful) in bright orange vests (more awful, see below).
Matt’s a goalkeeper (hence why he avoided the cursed vests) and was 10x better than the next best player in our team. We still lost every week - speaks volumes about our ‘talent’ really.
Yes, trudging to Vauxhall every Thursday just to lose was humbling. But, the convivial pub trips to talk ‘tactics’ post-match were the foundation of Matt and I’s real friendship.
Side note re: ‘tactics’: If anyone from the ESL is reading, can someone explain what the hell does “rotating five dice” mean? Everyone accepted it without question as our foundational tactical approach, but clearly those words, in that order, mean nothing.
Our shared interests? Matt’s dog, trauma bonding over the early stages of our detested corporate jobs, and the 2016 League Two Play Off Final (Matt’s a Plymouth fan and they LOST, unluckyyyyy 🤪)
Our dinner conversation, when not becoming increasingly flummoxed by a procession of waiters akin to a fire drill in a clown car, was lovely - though having not seen each other for a long time it did focus on catching up on the bigger stuff - friends, work, the footy, you know how it is.
Matt had also signed up for pizza without knowing that dinner itself was only half the journey, happily oblivious that I was planning to write it up afterwards.
Unavoidably, that meant no awareness of the structure and unavoidably caused a mild panic when in the meal’s twilight I said to him “come on then, let’s smash out the format points.”
Without the benefit of forward planning, Matt’s shared memory was more a general reminiscence of those halcyon summer evenings in 2021 at whatever Kennington pub was nearby our 5-a-side pitch. Feeling like real adults playing sport after work, one-too-many Thursday beers, and navigating the special type of hell that is a grad scheme while finding comfort that you’re in it together.
Mine, for Matt, was more specific - a Sunday morning in Spring 2022 when a small group of us hopped on the Metropolitan Line to Chorleywood. A spirited round of golf, a pint at the pub, a meal with Matt’s family and a lazy afternoon watching the F1 (I can take or leave the F1, I made friends with the dog). I remember it all fondly.
For me, Matt is exactly the type of person this journey is about. Matt came to my birthday in October, we chatted one-on-one for no more than 5 minutes, and then speed ran the late-20s conversation bingo by agreeing immediately that we “must go for pints soon”.
The difference is that this year, I’m actually doing it.
I’m so grateful to him that he booked in the time - he’s a great guy and I hope he came out of dinner as refreshed as me that all friendships, old or new, hold true value when as adults we can give ourselves the confidence enough to build them out of little sparks.
Thanks to you, the reader, for joining the journey too. I hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of the London Pizza Pal newsletter, and can’t wait to welcome you back again soon.
Bye! 🍕
Want to be a guest and join me for dinner? Book your slot using this calendar: https://cal.com/andrew-cowburn/pizza
Many highlights, but surely the pinnacle (or, should I say, Trajan's Column) is the extension of the Coliseum metaphor