Abby Connolly
Raise your hand if you tried making Gigi Hadid’s recipe for spicy vodka pasta when she shared it during lockdown in 2020. I know a whole lot of food lovers did.
While Gigi may have had thousands of people making the dish and expressing their love for pasta with vodka sauce, she certainly wasn’t the first person to create an amazing variation of the dish.
But, some could argue she did resurge the nation’s love for it.
Do you know about the origins of vodka sauce?
Vodka sauce, in all of its tangy, creamy, and sometimes spicy glory, is thought to have originated in Italy around the 1960s. It also appeared in New York City in the 1970s and became popular in Italian restaurants.
Then came Carbone, the famous Italian restaurant in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. When Carbone opened in 2013, their vodka sauce rigatoni dish quickly became famous, as they were one of the very first restaurants to popularize a spicy vodka sauce.
Not to mention, that spicy vodka pasta dish lies behind an exclusive dining experience. To this day, getting a reservation at Carbone requires a lot of work in advance, and not everyone is lucky enough to dine there.
The spicy rigatoni vodka pasta at Carbone has gone from $24 to $34 over the last ten years, and many of those who have eaten it still insist it’s something New Yorkers should try at least once in their lives.
When the intensities of the COVID-19 pandemic got worse in March of 2020, and Gigi Hadid posted her spicy vodka pasta recipe a month into lockdown, it finally allowed those who had been hearing about Carbone’s spicy rigatoni for years a chance to catch a slight glimpse into what it may taste like.
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