The riggies sub is the Utica move of taking a plated pasta dish and forcing it into a roll, and the dish in question is chicken riggies: rigatoni and chunks of chicken in a spicy tomato-cream sauce sharp with hot and sweet cherry peppers. Putting that on bread is not an obvious idea, because a saucy short pasta has no interest in staying inside a sandwich. The defining problem of the riggies sub is containment. Everything about the build is an argument with a filling that is actively trying to slide out the open end of the roll.
The craft is in managing the sauce and choosing the bread for it. The riggies are made a touch tighter and drier than they would be on a plate, the sauce reduced enough to cling to the rigatoni and the chicken rather than pool, because a loose sauce turns the roll to mush before it reaches the hand. The cherry peppers, the hot ones for heat and the sweet ones for body, are the sharp counter that keeps a rich tomato-cream sauce from going flat in sandwich form, and they earn their place more here than on the plate. The roll has to be a sturdy sub roll with a real crust and a tender interior, toasted when the build is done well, because the toast is a partial seal that buys the bread time against the sauce. The rigatoni is loaded so the tubes interlock and grip rather than roll, which is the structural reason the dish uses a ridged, hollow pasta in the first place. It is a knife-optional sandwich at best, eaten fast, and built knowing the clock started the moment the sauce met the bread.
The riggies sub belongs to the small, stubborn category of pasta-in-a-roll sandwiches and to the wider sub family that keeps the long roll and changes the filling entirely, alongside the Utica greens that share its city and its cherry-pepper heat. Those are their own builds with their own rules and deserve their own articles rather than being crowded in here.