At Corto in Jersey City, diners enjoy the comforting Angry Chicken, stewed pork, salumi plates, seasonal-inspired appetizers and an assemblage of fresh and extruded plates of pasta, all within their cozy, quaint dining room or on the homey outdoor patio.
This isn’t a secret. Corto is still one of the best restaurants in New Jersey. Cucina Povera, AKA poverty cooking, is central to their concept. Good ingredients, good technique, loads of simplicity and doing it all without wandering off into unnecessary luxuries. It’s, at its core, traditional Italian cooking that is molded to fit into a Jersey City Heights outfit.
There is a pasta on Corto’s menu that is undoubtedly the simplest, and one I find too many people pass over. Whenever a friend of mine tells me they ate at Corto over the weekend, I always ask the same question: “Did you get the rigatoni?”
To me, the rigatoni at Corto is perfect. Its stupidly simple makeup is exactly the reason to order it. The Corto team shows you that with good ingredients and textbook technique, they can put together something inexplicably delicious without a grocery list of ingredients. Sure, all of Corto’s pastas are great, but this one will always be my favorite. Corto could put a diamond-crusted agnolotti on the menu, charge three bucks for it, and if I could only pick one, I’d still go for the rigatoni. Every. Single. Time.
So, what is it?
It starts with house-extruded rigatoni. Tubular pasta made from semolina and water—textured on the outside so that sauce easily sticks to it like glue. And that sauce is the key to it all.
They render diced pancetta in a pan along with Calabrian chili. Once crisp, crushed tomato is added directly to the pan and cooked a la minute—AKA, to order. No big batches or long simmers; this isn’t meant to resemble a Sunday-style sauce where one would braise meat in tomato sauce for hours. Instead, the tomato’s bright acidity and sweetness are the star around which the chorus forms.
A quality tomato is crucial when utilizing a quick cook, and Corto employs Bianco DiNapoli tomatoes from California for the job, which I consider to be the best canned tomato on the market (sorry, Jersey Fresh, I still love you!). The tomato simmers for just a few minutes while the pasta cooks.
They drain the pasta and add it directly to the pan along with torn basil, mint and Pecorino Romano. The mint is the real kicker here, providing a cooling effect to counteract the heat of the Calabrian chili. Its herbaceousness permeates the dish’s entirety, playing well off the funk of the Pecorino and pancetta.
Corto’s rigatoni is a perfectly balanced dish. It’s simple and executed with poise. The pasta has a nice chew to it, there’s funk, there’s spice and the tomato is fresh and lively. My favorite part? It’s unapologetically a pantry pasta—something you can whip up at home in under 20 minutes. You might not have a pasta extruder, but I’m sure you have a box of dried pasta.
It’s true homestyle cooking—the foundation of Corto’s concept and the reason why they show up on the “best” lists year after year. For me, it’s more than that. It’s a lesson in flavor making and a good reminder that, oftentimes, less is more.
I said it before and will repeat: if I can only pick one dish, it’s the rigatoni—every time.
Don’t believe me? Try it yourself and get back to me.
Peter Candia is the Food + Drink Editor at New Jersey Digest. A graduate of The Culinary Institute of America, Peter found a passion for writing midway through school and never looked back. He is a former line cook, server and bartender at top-rated restaurants in the tri-state area. In addition to food, Peter enjoys politics, music, sports and anything New Jersey.
