The Central New York Pasta That’s Winning Over Philly

A bowl of Corio’s chicken riggies / Photograph courtesy of Corio

Welcome to Just One Dish, a Foobooz series that looks at an outstanding item on a Philly restaurant’s menu — the story behind the dish, how it’s made, and why you should be going out of your way to try it.

If you’ve spent any time in Central New York’s Utica or Rome — not to be confused with the ancient Phoenician metropolis or the Italian capital — you’ll know about chicken riggies. Virtually every old-school Italian-American joint in the area serves the hearty pasta dish, made with rigatoni (hence the name), chicken, hot or sweet peppers, and often mushrooms and olives, doused in a creamy tomato sauce.

I’ve had riggies plenty of times over the years during visits to my in-laws, who live just outside of Utica, and seen first-hand how beloved they are. There’s the annual Riggie Run, where 5K runners pause halfway through the race for a bowl (talk about carbo loading), and Riggiefest, where judges crown the best in the region. I’ve even seen people at a Utica Comets hockey game holding signs rooting for chicken riggies. As Mary Kiernan, Riggiefest judge and undergraduate director of food studies at nearby Syracuse University, puts it, “It is the kind of dish that sets place for a culture and it surely has done that for Utica.”

If all this makes you want to jump in the car and drive five hours north for a taste, you can drop your keys. Thanks to Rome native and Corio chef David Feola, Philadelphians don’t have to travel far for the Central New York classic. They’ve been on the menu since the University City restaurant opened last May, and while Corio offers a number of pastas, alongside pizzas and modern Italian-American fare, the riggies are by far their top seller.

When Feola was approached about the concept for Corio — which he runs with fellow Vernick alums James Smith and Ryan Mulholland — “chicken riggies” was the first thing he wrote down. At previous restaurant jobs in Philly and New York City, he looked forward to making riggies when it was his turn to cook family meal. “I was always like, if I ever have a restaurant where it fits, I want to put it on the menu,” he says. “I was stoked when I got a chance to put it on.”

It was Feola’s fondness for spice that drew him to chicken riggies from an early age. “One of the reasons I fell in love with it so fast as a kid was because I’ve always liked spicy food,” Feola says, reminiscing about how he would snack on dried peppers his grandma made. “It would be my go-to when we went out to eat,” he says, a dish he considers the ultimate comfort food. “It’s heavy but not too heavy. It’s warm. It just makes me so happy.” And though it’s been a while since Feola has been back, he says, “when I do go home, I will get it.”

At Corio, Feola recreates the riggies he grew up with. “I just took what I remembered about the ones that I liked eating and I kind of elevated it,” he says. His version is made with house-extruded rigatoni (or a gluten-free option), braised chicken, hot and sweet peppers, button mushrooms, and olives — a popular variation omits these two components, but to Feola the dish is incomplete without them — plus plenty of Parmesan, and a rich blush sauce. “With all of that, you’re hitting essentially every tastebud,” he says. “To me, that’s why it’s so great. You have every taste component in one bowl of pasta, and the beauty of it is you’re not getting every single one with every bite.” Feola likes that in one forkful you might get a hit of saltiness and a hint of briny olive with some acidity from the tomatoes, and in another, there could be a cherry pepper.

But it’s the sauce that really does the heavy lifting, acting as an anchor for its mélange of flavors. It also requires the most work in the kitchen. The two-day process begins with cooking down basil, garlic, and white onions in olive oil, until they’re so soft they could fall apart at the touch of a spoon.The next day, he sautés diced onion and minced garlic in that house-made oil — a step that adds complexity to the mix — before incorporating Roma tomatoes and reducing it all down to a thick, concentrated paste. As each bowl of riggies is assembled, a little of that pre-made tomato mixture gets combined with chicken stock, butter, cheese, and cream to lighten things up. The result is a velvety, robust sauce with enough viscosity to cling to the pasta, and a depth of flavor that runs through the whole dish.

While Corio’s chicken riggies have become a favorite with diners, they’ve also attracted Philly’s small community of Central New York transplants. There’s a regular from a Utica suburb who visits for a taste of home. Then there are patrons Feola can tell are from his neck of the woods from the “immediate recognition” on their faces when they see riggies on the menu. Occasionally, folks ask their server if they have another regional specialty: Utica greens — a cheesy, breadcrumb-coated jumble of escarole, cherry peppers, garlic, and prosciutto, or other cured meat. (For those interested, they have a version made with pancetta on the dinner menu as a side to the roast chicken, though they don’t call them “Utica greens.”)

Naturally, the pasta has become a conversation starter. “This one lady straight-up looked at me and she was like, ‘Where are you from?’,” Feola recalls with a laugh. “I go, ‘Central New York,’ and she goes, ‘I know that. Where are you from?’” Surely the riggies say it all.