Crust Fund, a mythical pizzeria in a Chicago alley (original) (raw)

John Carruthers (cq) cuts his pizzas in a classic square shape while preparing an order at his Ravenswood home on Thursday, Oct. 24, 2024. He runs the charity Crust Fund Pizza by making his tavern-style creations at home and handing them off to customers in the alley behind his home. Customers either consume the pizza in his garage or take them to go. (Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune/TNS)TNS

CHICAGO -- Crust Fund Pizza is not a pizzeria.

"It's like a pizzeria, but it's kind of mythical, and mostly exists in my head, except for when it exists in an alley a couple nights a month," said John Carruthers, who calls himself proprietor, "because it sounds funny and old-timey."

Carruthers is the founder and serious amateur pizzaiolo of the charitable pizza project that's raised more than $80,000 to date, largely with winning bidders picking up homemade pies in the alley behind his house in the Ravenswood neighborhood.

"Crust Fund Pizza is a way to share the love of tavern-style pizza," he said about the Chicago-style, thin-crust, square-cut pies. "And to shine a light on the places doing real, good direct work to make Chicago a better place to live."

His day job is director of communications at Revolution Brewing, based in the Avondale neighborhood, the largest independently owned craft brewery in Illinois.

"It's honestly how I found a lot of my earliest charities," he added. "Through the work I do with the charitable giving program there."

How does Crust Fund work?

"I've got my job," Carruthers said. "I didn't want to make any money off of this. So I set it up where I pick a different charity every month, and some of them come back. But there's one organization a month that we say, ‘This is the story. This is what they do. This is what we focus on. This is who we're making pizza for this month.' And instead of giving me money, and I give it to them, you give it to them, you have to show me your donation receipt and I say you're good to go, pick up your pizza at the appointed time."

You can sign up for the mailing list on the Crust Fund website or check his Instagram account at @nachosandlager for monthly charitable pizza details.

By the end of this year, he expects to have raised more than $100,000 since launching in 2020, with more pizza drops this year, plus the release of a second cookbook, "Super Pizza World," funded on Kickstarter, and fulfilled by the end of November.

Zach Sherwood designed the new book and the first book, "Pizza For Everyone."

"He is an incredible designer," Carruthers said. "And has not taken a dime, did two entire books, and is also not doing this as his job job."

So what were the pizza maker's childhood pizzerias, possibly the origin story of his personal pizza world?

"Gosh, so I grew up in McHenry," Carruthers said. "The pizza I remember the best is Stuc's."

That location has closed, but two remain open in Wisconsin.

"The Village Squire was our fancy place, if there was a post-dance kind of place, or a birthday party," Carruthers said. "And then for the day-to-day pizza, we were a big Rosati's family."

Did those pizzas inspire his style?

"This is not me trying to talk smack on how I grew up," he said laughing. "A lot of people I know tend to talk about their recipes as this kind of loving bonsai tree that they just nurtured into perfect form."

Instead, he had things that would annoy him about certain pizzas.

"I wish this crust was crispier," he added. "I wish this one wasn't drowning in such cheap cheese. I wish there was more of the sauce on this. So it was kind of like sanding off all these annoying burrs of what I was doing until I'm like, ‘OK, this isn't any of the pizza I grew up with, but it's the exact pizza I wanted to grow up with.'"

What pizzas does he think his style resembles now?

"Middle Brow Tavern Tuesdays are amazing, and they're even thinner than mine," Carruthers said about the weekly special extremely thin crust pizza at Bungalow by Middle Brow in the Logan Square neighborhood. "Michael's in Uptown is also a lot of what I like."

And Frank's on Belmont Avenue is fantastic, he added about the pizzeria in the Dunning neighborhood.

Pizza nerds like us talk a lot about the importance of crust, but what are his go-to toppings?

"Both my favorite, and the thing I sell the most of, is the pizza I call the Royko. It's sausage and giardiniera," said Carruthers, but again, to clarify, he's not selling pizzas per se.

The late Pulitzer Prize-winning Tribune columnist Mike Royko was the namesake of the pizza.

Chicago is one of the few places in the entire country where pepperoni is not the No. 1 topping, because we're a big sausage town.

"I grind my own sausage," he added. "I've been doing sausage for longer than I have pizza."

Recently, he invited Margaret Pak of Thattu and Mike Satinover of Akahoshi Ramen to drop by during a winning bidder's alley pizza pickup. Not to cook, but just to join his mythical pizzeria community.

"I end up at these things with actual chefs now," Carruthers said. "And I feel like two children in a trench coat."

He said Satinover has been a buddy for years, and appears in both books, but has never had a Crust Fund pizza.

"And then Margaret is another person who's just a super nice, supportive person in the food community in Chicago," Carruthers said. "So I just want her take on how the pizza is, and she was gracious enough to say, ‘Sure, I'll come by.'"

Crust Fund Pizza has clearly become an inspiring and whimsical project that can only happen in Chicago. While we should be inclusive of all pizza styles, New York could never, with their floppy slices and their lack of alleys. Here they're transformed into a magical and wondrous space. Imagine the moment when you walk into an alley in Chicago and you're rewarded for your generosity with pizza.

"And sometimes I've had people show up and go, ‘Oh, my gosh, it actually is in an alley,'" Carruthers said. "Like they were gonna end up at the back door of a restaurant or something."

Since he's friends with Satinover, who began as the amateur Ramen Lord on Reddit and said he would never open a restaurant, would Carruthers ever open a pizzeria?

"Well, so we share an obsession," he said, about his with pizza, and Satinover with ramen. "What Mike doesn't have is kids who are school-age."

"This started with making pizza for my family," Carruthers said. "Family is still the No. 1 priority. Having worked in kitchens, I can't in good conscience think about the idea of running my own place until they're at least old enough to be teenagers."

But he still thinks about it, of course.

"I'll watch ‘The Bear' and be like, I don't know, this could be pretty fun if he let it."

Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune/TNS Chris Sweda TNS

This story was originally published November 11, 2024, 4:07 AM.