Crust & Craft set to open on Route 1

The crust of a pizza should be a highlight, said Brenton Wallace during a Sept. 23 interview.

“Without a good crust, it’s flavors on top of nothing,” said the owner of the Cape Region’s newest pizza restaurant, Crust & Craft. “To me, the most important part of the pizza is the crust.”

Wallace’s restaurant will feature 13-inch Neapolitan-style pizzas made with dough that’s been hand-rolled after 72 hours of fermentation. Wallace said the fermentation makes a crust that can support the remaining ingredients and is easy to chew.

“The area is missing a place with this concept,” he said.

The pizzas will be cooked in a custom-made, wood-burning Marra Forni pizza oven that has a cooking temperature of 800 to 900 degrees. Wallace said the restaurant showcases the red-bricked pizza oven.

“I see it as the hearth of the restaurant,” he said.

Located on the northbound side of Route 1 in the Midway Galleria, 18701 Coastal Highway, Crust & Craft is the culmination of a long-sought goal, said Wallace.

“This is my baby,” he said.

Wallace said he’s known he wanted to work in a kitchen since he was a teenager working for a small luncheonette in State College, Pa. He said the head cook of the restaurant laughed when, at the age of 15, he said he wanted to go to chef school.

“You want to cook for a living?” Wallace remembers the cook asking with a what-an-idiot tone.

Undeterred, Wallace enrolled in the highly-regarded culinary program of Johnson & Wales University, graduating in 1998. Afterwards, he lived in Scottsdale, Ariz., for two years before moving to Philadelphia in 2000.

Wallace said bounced around the city working in different kitchens for nearly a decade before falling in love with the process of making wood-fired pizzas in 2009 while working for Zavino, one of the best pizza places in the Philadelphia area.

“I loved that model and the simplicity of the food,” he said.

Wallace and his wife moved to Rehoboth in 2011 after visiting the area numerous times.

“We were literally sitting in Que Pasa, and I was like, I think I want to open a restaurant here,” he said.

Wallace continued to pursue the opening of his own restaurant, while at the same time garnering relationships in some of the area’s most well-known restaurants. He worked in the kitchen at Nage for two and a half years before taking over as chef de cuisine for Dogfish Head Brewing & Eats in 2013.

Wallace said he's going to put into practice lessons learned from working at the two well-known eateries. He said working with Nage's Hari Cameron taught him that locals need to be appreciated, and catered to, for a Route 1 business to be busy during the winter months. Appreciating co-workers and creating a community is what Wallace said he learned at Dogfish.

Wallace said the opportunity to purchase the space between China Buffet and Panera’s came about in January. Renovations began shortly afterwards.

“It was completely gutted,” he said.

Crust & Craft is going to be more than just pizza and beer.

There will also be four to five homemade pastas and and ocean snacks at the restaurant everyday, said Wallace.

“I’ve got that beautiful oven and I want to use it to its full potential,” he said.

There will be six drafts on tap, 75 to 100 bottles and cans of craft beer, 20 wines by the bottle and, said Wallace, 10 to 12 wines by the glass.

Wallace said Crust & Craft will be opening in early October. He said for the first few weeks the restaurant’s hours will be 3 p.m to 10 p.m., Sunday through Thursday, and 3 p.m. to 11 p.m., Friday and Saturday. Opening hours will switch to 11 a.m., seven days a week, after the initial kinks are worked out, said Wallace.

Happy hour will be 3 p.m. to 7 p.m., everyday, said Wallace.

The restaurant’s website is under construction, said Wallace, but the address will be crustandcraftde.com. For the time being the restaurant can be followed on Facebook. The phone number is 313-5029.