Jeff Allen: At Crust on James Island, 'A Rare Slice of Pie'

"Sure, you can get great pizza about town in a number of stylistic interpretations, but Crust is the only place serving the kind you actually find in Italy, the kind so thin that you don't pick it up but rather eat it with a knife and fork," writes Jeff Allen about the new-ish James Island restaurant in this month's dispatch for Charleston Magazine.

He decides their beer selection is "excellent," but thinks chef Dusty Chorvat has "far too few" gnocchi and panini options, and would like to see fresh pasta on the menu. Allen praises the appetizers, particularly a somewhat unexpected one:

"But it's the very un-Italian hot wings that keep me coming back. Served alone, they're marginal, but Chorvat has been buying a certain pepper from Pete Ambrose's farm out on Wadmalaw and makes a special piquant sauce for those in the know. Ask them to heat it up, then slather your wings in it and there are none better in this entire town."

The review is mixed (there's "glorious" Mepkin Abbey mushrooms with one dish, others perhaps suffer from a heavy-handed application of Grana Padano), but Allen decides in the end "Crust delivers value and quality."

· The Review: Crust [Charleston Mag]
· All Coverage of Crust [-ECHS-]

[Photo: Facebook]