Crust Tap Room — Restaurant in Jefferson Township

Gotta start by saying: the service staff is amazing, the food and drink are great, and this is why I’ve become a regular at Crust in the past few months since its opening in my neighborhood. I’m there at least once or twice a week to watch a game or grab dinner and an after work craft beer. But I witnessed one of the most unprofessional and appalling incidents of a manager berating one of the bartenders in front of both me as a guest and other service staff last night, and I don’t know if I will ever be back after this.

In my many visits to Crust, I’ve always enjoyed the food and drink and excellent service provided by their staff, particularly their bartenders like Kurt and Brian and their servers like Jay. They are knowledgeable, helpful, and seem to genuinely care about their product and work.

But I have noticed on several occasions that some of their managers tend to sit away from patrons, facing the kitchen, and quite often playing on their phones while the rest of staff are working around them. They don’t greet patrons as they walk in, they don’t interact with patrons at all. It seemed odd, but I looked past it because everything else seemed great.

Last night, I was finishing my meal and drink around closing when a manager came over to speak to the bartender and proceeded to get in his face and loudly berate him (in plain view and earshot of myself and two other staff members) for wanting to keep music on while closing up and for wanting windows open during business hours to bring in business? When the bartender asked why the manager refused to have fun at work, she replied “Because I’m working!” And the bartender said “So am I, but I still manage to have fun while I do it.”

I was mortified as a patron but I cannot imagine this experience as one of the staff members to have a manager behave so rudely and unprofessionally to and in front of their subordinates. If a serious matter needs to be discussed, an employee can be taken aside and away from patrons and other employees. I’ve worked in and around the service industry for over 20 years, and this was the most shocking display I have ever witnessed.

Again, I love the service, the food, and the beer, but if this is how management treats their employees, I can’t continue to support such a business. Leader Bar was awful to its employees, but sadly, Crust seems to be masquerading as good while doing...

I’ll start by saying I miss Leader. Not the recent leader after it was sold and then failed but the original leader. The ribeye and the pot roast were favorites and you could always count on the tacos. Our first foray into Crust was just okay. We had a marg pizza and that was good though if I wanted that much toasted crust without any sauce on it I would just order toasted bread. The crust border was more than two inches in spots. The Supremes pizza was an easy one to get right because it’s basically everything but given that, it really didn’t do much for the taste buds. With all that was going on you’d think you would taste something. The Korean BBQ wings were pretty disappointing but only in name. They tasted fine but lacked any flavor that said they were Korean. They tasted like a KC style sauce with some chili or red pepper added. The Soy, ginger, and sesame you normally expect from Korean was missing completely. Compared to leader the buffalo wings were terrible. The sauce is runny and vinegary and tastes more like a North Carolina wing sauce than western New York. I’ve been to the Anchor Bar and these aren’t even close. To top it off, we couldn’t tell the difference between their blue cheese dressing and the ranch. The blue cheese was runny and tart without a single trademark clump like a good blue cheese would have. They left the comfortable, warm dark wood, Leader Bar decor as it was and despite being over worked, service was great so that gained them a star or two. The beers were fine. With the glut of urban tap rooms in and around Chicago, this is another that will likely play it safe and the offering will be just like all the others. Mostly over-hopped with silly names. Overall I found Crust Tap Room uninspired but given the choices we have in the neighborhood, we’ll take it. Though we really didn’t need another...

We went in on a Friday night and they were not very busy. We had been excited to try them because we love pizza and this is the close to home. We ordered 2 pizzas, the chicago pizza with Italian beef and giard and the pepperoni with hot honey. We also ordered cheese curds and fries. I wanted to try the fries because I noticed steak frites on the menu and thought it may be a future dinner order. The margarita was your average poorly made dive bar marg. Not a great start. Then the curds came out fast. First arrived 40 minutes later, and 15 mins after that the other. The fries came out 10 minutes after that. The server, though nice, was inattentive. We each ate one slice of our pizza, and looked at each other disappointed in the whole overall experience. It was flavorless. The crust was crispy but the ingredients on the Italian beef pizza were stingy and the cheese was minimal. Sauce was nothing spectacular. His pepperoni pizza was loaded with pepperoni and whipped ricotta, but he was fairly certain it was lower grade pepperoni than what it should have been. He eats a lot of pepperoni pizza, so I trust his judgement on that. The fries were your standard frozen fry, no seasoning, not even salt. Eventually our server came back and offered us boxes for the pizzas that we hardly had touched. We declined, offering our feedback that we simply didn’t like the pizza. I said I was happy to just take our check and leave.

The manager did the right thing and didn’t charge us for the pizzas which we certainly appreciated. We unfortunately will not be back, because the overall experience was not worth a trip back.

I hope they can work out the quality and timing issues. I would hate to see another dead restaurant.

We will stick to Bellona’s for their chicago combo pizza and jets for Detroit pizza when we stay in the...