Crush Pizza

I love dining out. I do it about 1000 times a year, but there's no doubt that take out and delivery are a big part of the business now. So you want a place that's great at that in your restaurant roster. A place like Crush Pizza.

Crush Pizza is a small spot on a little corner in East Boston. There's about 20 seats. There's a great mural behind me that pays tribute to the big landmarks in East Boston, the airport and the Madonna and I have found in my dining career, when a restaurant uses tomato cans as decoration, the food is always good.

Tony Nasser is like a professor of pie-ology, and he insists on making just about everything from scratch.

“The name Crush comes from hand crushing Italian tomatoes. We make everything from scratch, especially when it comes to the pizza. We make our dough every single day, we hand crush our tomatoes, and then we run the pizzas through a high temperature oven, gets them nice and crispy.” It’s thin, so it’s a lot different than your everyday pizzeria.

At Crush, you can do a make your own pie. So sometimes to get inspiration, I just walk down the line and look at the 30 different ingredients I can combine into one pizza.

The Pork Face pie features these big cups of pepperoni, so big they keep that pepperoni flavor right inside. And they're so big, they actually put sausage and bacon bits inside the cup of pepperoni, then the bacon and sausages scattered throughout the pizza. I'm going to stuff my face with this pork face.

“When you bite into the Pork Face pizza you get the crispiness from the pepperoni, you get all the saltiness from the bacon and from the sausage, and then you get the sweetness from the hot honey. It’s an amazing pizza.”

If you like Tom Brady, you don't eat tomatoes. You may want to try the New York White pie, no red sauce on this one. It has parmesan and ricotta and a lot of garlic. I think it's the ricotta that really sets this pie apart, making it so creamy.

“So most white sauces are almost like an Alfredo. We make our garlic cream sauce in house, so it's all fresh. Then after it comes out, we drizzle it with extra virgin olive oil and more Parmesan cheese. It's a great pizza, and it's been very, very popular. “

This is Italian. This is Sicilian. That's today's pizza lesson.

The Pesto Vodka and Pepperoni is a Sicilian style pie. Look at those beautiful cups of pepperoni holding in all that flavor, getting nice and crispy when they cook it the pesto smothered all over the pie with the cheese and a vodka sauce. So you can really taste that pepperoni and pesto.

“When you bite into it, you get all the flavors from the vodka, from the pesto and from the pepperoni, all that juices. It's a delicious pizza.”

The Sicilian Supreme is made with big slices of pepperoni, pieces of sausage, peppers, onions and mushrooms. If you want to chow down, one slice of this will do a lot to fill you up.

As you can see, this is a thick, dense, satisfying slice.

“Our Sicilian dough is actually made in house and with the Supreme is nice. It's more like a meat lovers pizza, but with vegetables.”

I think my favorite soup is French onion soup, and my favorite sub is a steak and cheese sub this brilliantly combines the two. It's got shaved steak, caramelized onion, the au jus, the melted cheese, all on a toasted roll.

“When you bite into it, it's just like taking that first spoonful of the stringy cheese and the French onion soup and it's really nice, and you get that nice beefy flavor and you get that cheese pull”

The Neapolitan sub is something different. It combines bread and chicken with prosciutto. Then there is Basil, Red peppers, balsamic glaze and extra virgin olive oil.

“Our Neapolitan sub is a great sub. It's really nice and big. It's crispy tenders. We put fresh mozzarella on it. Then we put nice thin slices of prosciutto, we drizzle it with some balsamic glaze and extra virgin olive oil and roasted red peppers that really make it.”

I would call these adult chicken fingers, because they are gigantic. They're fresh. You can see all that delicious white meat, and they're coated fresh, so you can really get that crisp, but you can still taste the chicken. You can get them in four, six or ten per order.

“Our jumbo chicken tenders are nice and crispy and you can get them with your choice of sauces. We have the sweet and sour, the sweet chili, buffalo ranch and blue cheese. So any type of sauces, or you can combine all of them together if you want.

The meatball sandwich here is a triple threat. It is homemade meatballs, homemade marinara sauce and homemade bread. It's got Provolone and mozzarella cheese melting into those meatballs and that marinara sauce with the crunch of that homemade bread.

“Our homemade meatballs are 100% beef. It's made fresh, fresh seasoning, fresh garlic. It's nice and juicy. And we get them just right.”

I love the motto here, family, friends and pizza. All My Favorite Things.

Crush Pizza, my taste buds have a crush on you.