What is Crust Simply Italian?
Crust Simply Italian is the restaurant that Michael Merendino’s Long Island childhood became. It opened in 2007 in Suite F101 at 8300 N Hayden Road, in Mercado del Lago, the Spanish-styled center on the west shore of the McCormick Ranch lake, and it is the first store of what is now Crust Restaurant Group, with Simply Italian rooms in Chandler, Gilbert, Peoria and downtown Mesa and pizzeria counters in Tempe and Phoenix. Phoenix New Times calls the Hayden Road room “the original Crust location.”
Merendino is a first-generation Italian-American from Great Neck, New York. His mother’s recipes came from Abruzzi; his father was born in Toretta, Sicily, and ran a pizzeria called Francesca’s, where Michael worked from a young age. The father’s signature was the Pizza Rustica, his evolution of the pizzetta the village children of Toretta used to make by stretching bread dough thin, baking it in the shared oven and topping it with tomatoes, fresh cheese, olive oil and basil. That pie came to Scottsdale in 2007 and has not left the menu.
The rest of the menu is East Coast Italian made from scratch, by the restaurant’s own rule: if the kitchen did not cook it, the restaurant does not serve it. There are hand-tossed 20-inch New York pies, Sicilian squares, calzones and stromboli, 14 pastas, heroes on seeded rolls, chopped salads and protein bowls for the McCormick Ranch gym crowd, and cannoli and tiramisu. Since April 26, 2024, there has also been a 42-seat speakeasy, The Goose, behind the dining room, the third of the group’s bird-named lounges.
Who it is for: the Ranch. Families off the Greenbelt, the lake-view patio set in winter, office lunches from Via de Ventura, and anyone who grew up near a real Long Island pizzeria and has not found one west of the Hudson. Our verdict: the most reliable neighborhood Italian in central Scottsdale, better at pizza and heroes than at ambition, and the only restaurant on the lake that now has a bar you need to know about to find.
Ordering at Crust
Order the Rustica. The Pizza Rustica is the thin, stretched Sicilian-village pie from Merendino’s father’s shop, priced $13 to $16 depending on the topping: the Grandma’s (plum tomato, fresh mozzarella, garlic and basil) and Long Island Special are $15, the Margherita $14, the plain New York $13, and the Palermo, Uncle Louie, Supreme and Sweet Little ‘Roni $16. The same toppings on the hand-tossed 20-inch run $21 to $29; a plain New York cheese is $21, and on Sunday and Monday it is $15 for takeout. The Sicilian comes two ways, the Upside Down (sauce over cheese, $15 a half, $28.50 whole) and the Big John ($19 and $33).
Then a pasta or a hero. The pastas run $19 (Angel Hair Pomodoro) to $26 (Linguine Frutti di Mare), with Grandma’s Pasta ($24), the Short Rib Pappardelle ($24), Short Rib Stuffed Ravioli ($23) and Spicy Rigatoni Sausage ($23.50) the house favorites, and a Penne Alla Scottsdale ($22.50) with grilled chicken, spinach and cherry tomatoes in a garlic-parmesan broth named for the original store. The heroes are the lunch: Chicken Parm $15, Meatball Parm $14.50, a Chop Chop Hero and the La La Vodka Hero at $16, a Salmon BLT at $17. Calzones are $14 to $17. Desserts stop at $12 for the tiramisu; a cannoli is $5.
Timing. Hours are 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday. The patio side of Mercado del Lago faces the water, and from November through April it is the seat to ask for; in summer the dining room is the point. Weeknight walk-ins are easy. Weekend dinner is busier since The Goose opened, because the speakeasy’s guests eat first, so book through the Yelp link on the website.
The Goose is separate. The speakeasy opens at 5 p.m. nightly (until 10, midnight on Friday and Saturday), seats 42, takes its own reservations and serves the Crust kitchen: tangerine spiced olives, calamari, pizzettas, bone marrow, pasta. A restaurant booking does not get you in. Our guide to Scottsdale speakeasies covers the whole genre.
Getting there and what to skip. Mercado del Lago is at Hayden Road and Via de Ventura, with a free surface lot off Hayden; Crust is in the F building. Skip the bowls and the salmon unless you need them; this is a pizzeria with a pasta list, and the kitchen is at its best when it is doing what Francesca’s did.
The pizzeria that grew a flock
Crust’s story is a family pizzeria that turned into a restaurant group without changing its menu. Merendino opened the Hayden Road room in 2007, in the 2000s wave of chef-owned neighborhood Italian that also gave central Scottsdale its first serious Neapolitan ovens, and from the start he said he wanted ten locations. The next two were in the East Valley, downtown Chandler and Gilbert, and each came with a trick the original did not have: an attached cocktail lounge with a bird’s name, The Ostrich in Chandler and The Blue Heron in Gilbert, entered through the restaurant.
By late 2023 the group was moving fast. In the fall it took over two former Artichoke Basille’s counters, on Baseline Road in Tempe and 16th Street in Phoenix, as Crust Pizzeria. In January 2024 Merendino told KTAR that “things have changed and moved quickly over the last few months”: a fourth Simply Italian would go into The Grid on Main Street in Mesa, at 8,000 square feet with a 2,000-square-foot patio the largest Crust yet, with a lounge called The Nightingale and a donut-and-gelato shop called Bombolino, and the Scottsdale original, “the only current Crust Simply Italian without an adjoining speakeasy,” would get one. That became The Goose, which opened on Friday, April 26, 2024, with Art Deco goose wallpaper, a marble floor and 42 seats; it has its own guide on this site. Peoria followed with The Raven, and Mesa opened at 233 E Main Street.
What the record does not say is almost everything about the early years. We found no 2007 review of the Scottsdale opening, no account of how Merendino financed it, and no reliable description of what the Mercado del Lago suite was before Crust; the center dates from the 1980s and has turned over its dinner rooms many times, from the original Z’Tejas era to Vecina’s 2026 arrival in the lakeside building next door. Crust’s own site tells the family story and skips the business one.
Honest assessment: Crust is a good neighborhood pizzeria whose founder turned out to be a better developer than the Valley expected, and the Scottsdale room has been the beneficiary rather than the victim of that growth: the kitchen is the same, the menu has grown without bloating, and The Goose gave a 17-year-old restaurant a second reason to visit. It is not a destination for pizza purists, who will go to Pomo at Gainey or the wood-fired rooms in Old Town. It is where McCormick Ranch eats on a Tuesday, and on the lake, in February, with a Rustica and a glass of Montepulciano on the patio, that is enough.