Pastabilities at 43: How a Family Restaurant in Armory Square Outlasted a Mall, a Pandemic, and a Casino

By Jen Okafor, Staff Reporter

When Karyn Korteling and Patrick Heagerty rented their first kitchen in December 1982, the corner of Walton and South Franklin was not a destination. It was a holdover. The Syracuse Armory across the street still ran maneuvers. Tanks rolled past on weekends.

The blocks south of city hall were lined with shuttered warehouses and surface lots waiting for someone to decide what to do with them. Korteling later put it plainly to local press: “It was sort of a red light district at night.”

Forty-three years later, her restaurant is still open. Pastabilities, now at 311 S. Franklin Street on the Walton corner, has become the longest-running independent eatery in Armory Square and one of the very few Syracuse dining rooms that has been continuously operated by its founder since the Reagan administration. The block around it has churned through three economic eras, a regional mall, a global pandemic, and the rise of the Oneida casino circuit. The restaurant kept its lights on through all of it.

Fifteen thousand dollars and a folding table

Pastabilities opened on December 22, 1982. Korteling, then a recent graduate of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, partnered with Heagerty to lease a small storefront in the Flat Iron Building near Syracuse City Hall on East Genesee Street. They had $15,000 between them. The first iteration was a lunch-only pasta bar, cafeteria style, five sauces, salad and bread, weekdays only. That was the menu. That was the business plan.

Three years in, they took a risk that, at the time, looked like a worse idea than the original. They moved south, to a vacant building on a block where the rent was low because the foot traffic was lower. The new address sat across the street from what is now Kitty Hoynes Irish Pub. In 1985, that side of downtown was empty enough that Korteling moved into an apartment above the restaurant. “It was the only place to rent an apartment downtown,” she told the Daily Orange in 2017.

The Armory Square Historic District had been listed on the National Register of Historic Places the year before, in 1984. The designation was largely on paper. Most of the buildings were vacant or running half-empty. The neighborhood’s redevelopment plan, sketched by landscape architect George Curry and developer Robert Doucette over dinner one night in the early 1980s, was still mostly a sketch.

The bread that wasn’t theirs, and then was

Anyone who has eaten at Pastabilities knows the bread. It arrives warm, in a long slim loaf, with a small ramekin of garlic-flecked spicy tomato oil. Locals call it Stretch Bread. The restaurant trademarked a version of the name. The bakery across the street, Pasta’s Daily Bread at 308 S. Franklin, sells loaves to take home.

The honest version of how the bread got to the restaurant is more interesting than the marketing version. Stretch Bread, properly called striata in Italian baking tradition, was developed in its modern American form by a baker named Laura Holland, who ran a small bakery in the southern Cayuga County village of Aurora in 1994. Holland worked out the flour-to-water ratio and the long 15-hour rise that gives the loaf its open crumb. She later took the technique to Auburn, then to Skaneateles, and then to Rosalie’s Cucina, where she trained a colleague named Peter Lord. In the late 1990s, Lord came north to Syracuse and started baking at Pastabilities. He stayed about eight years. The bread stayed.

The provenance was the subject of a 2014 dispute and a Syracuse.com investigation, which traced the line back to Holland in Aurora. Local food writer Nancy Radke summarized the consensus: “I don’t think there’s any question that it started with Laura from Aurora.” Pastabilities did not invent the loaf. The restaurant turned it into a cultural object. Today the bakery turns out roughly 700 loaves a day, 358 days a year, paired with a sauce Korteling first tasted in Tuscany in 1989 and reverse-engineered when she got home.

The hot tomato oil story Korteling has told in multiple interviews: she walked into a small restaurant in Italy without enough Italian to read the menu, told the server “baby hungry,” and was brought a plate of pasta dressed in a sauce of olive oil, San Marzano tomatoes, and slivered garlic with a chili kick. She brought the idea back to Syracuse. Pasta’s Daily Bread sells it now under the brand name Hot Tom.

The block grows up around them

The Armory Square that grew up around Pastabilities was not the area Korteling moved into in 1985. The first wave of redevelopment came in the late 1980s and accelerated through the 1990s. New restaurants opened. Loft conversions began upstairs. By the time Carousel Center mall opened on the old Oil City brownfield site at the north end of Onondaga Lake on October 15, 1990, downtown retail had a real fight on its hands. Eagan Real Estate had warned of a 25 percent drop in downtown retail sales if the mall were built. The drop happened. Several small downtown malls and many storefront retailers did not survive it.

Pastabilities did. Restaurants on the Walton and Franklin corridor opened and closed around it. Syracuse Suds Factory came on at 320 S. Clinton in 1991 and was a fixture for three decades before closing in 2022. Lemon Grass moved into the neighborhood, then moved again. Wolff’s, Phoebe’s, the original incarnations of half a dozen bars and short-lived bistros each took their turn on the block. The constant was the corner of Walton and Franklin.

What 43 years actually means, in numbers

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks how long American businesses stay open. The median lifespan of an independent restaurant in the United States is roughly 4.5 years. Roughly half close before they hit five. About a third make it to ten. By twenty years, the cohort is small enough that the BLS does not publish granular national survival rates beyond it. By forty, the data are anecdotal. A continuously operating, founder-led independent restaurant at the 43-year mark is statistically rare in any American city. In Syracuse, on the same block, with the same kitchen, it is essentially singular.

That is what Pastabilities is now. The company says it employs roughly 80 people. The dining room seats about 200 with the patio. The kitchen produces about 150 pounds of fresh pasta and 700 loaves of bread a day. The restaurant operates 358 days a year. Korteling runs it with her two daughters, Rachel and Ryland Heagerty. Rachel is the kitchen manager and chef.

The Stretch Bread, by the numbers

The decades the restaurant outlasted

Patrick Heagerty died in 1995, when the restaurant was 13 years old and Armory Square’s revival was just starting to take. Korteling kept the place open and made every operational decision alone for the next several years. By 2001, demand for the bread justified opening a separate bakery across the street. Pasta’s Daily Bread now functions as a second business: sandwiches, sauces, takeaway pasta, and the loaves themselves, sold by the bag.

The 2010s brought attention. Guy Fieri filmed an episode of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives at the restaurant in 2012, the segment titled “Fully Focused.” Korteling appeared on camera making the hot tomato oil. The Wicked Chicken Riggies, a Central New York rigatoni dish in a chipotle and cherry pepper cream, became one of the kitchen’s most-ordered plates. The James Beard Foundation has not nominated Pastabilities; local recognition has come from Syracuse.com Readers Choice, which named it Best Restaurant in 2021, 2022, and 2023.

The 2020 closure was the closest the restaurant came to its first existential test. Like every full-service kitchen in New York, Pastabilities went dark on indoor dining for months. The pivot was takeout, then curbside, then heavily reduced capacity for the better part of a year. Many independents in Onondaga County did not reopen. According to local press tallies, dozens of Syracuse-area restaurants closed permanently between 2020 and 2023. Pastabilities did reopen, and within two years it had been honored by the Downtown Committee at its 40th anniversary.

The same period brought a different kind of pressure. The Oneida Indian Nation’s casino footprint , Turning Stone in Verona, Yellow Brick Road in Chittenango, Point Place in Bridgeport, has drawn restaurant spending out of Syracuse and into surrounding counties. The Nation’s $370 million Turning Stone Evolution expansion, with its Crescent Hotel and the new Salt restaurant scheduled for a June 2026 debut, will add another large food-and-beverage operation within a half-hour drive of downtown. Korteling has not commented publicly on the casino question. Her business has stayed full anyway.

Year 43, on the corner

Korteling, who is now in her 60s, runs the dining room with her daughters and a staff that includes employees who have been with her for a meaningful share of the restaurant’s history. The downtown Syracuse population has grown. About 4,300 people now live within the boundary the Downtown Committee tracks, with Armory Square’s apartments running near full occupancy. Many of those residents eat at Pastabilities the way an earlier generation ate at the Mizpah Hotel dining room. The customer base has rolled over twice and the restaurant has stayed in place.

The succession question is the one that hangs over every founder-run independent restaurant at this age. Rachel Heagerty is already running the kitchen. Ryland Heagerty co-owns. The next decade will determine whether Pastabilities transitions cleanly to the second generation or joins the long list of Central New York restaurants that closed when their founders stepped back. For now, on a Friday in April 2026, the line for a table runs out the door onto South Franklin, and the bread keeps coming out warm.

Pastabilities is at 311 S. Franklin Street, Syracuse, NY 13202. Pasta’s Daily Bread is at 308 S. Franklin Street.

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