Finally, after years of hoping, wishing and pleading, Main Street will once again have a delicious, permanent restaurant.
Joe Rocco’s, a New York style pizzeria, will be housed in the former Go Young Fashions building on Main Street, where it intersects with Second Street. For most people, creating a New York style restaurant in Columbia would be difficult. But for a born and bred New Yorker like Kristian Agoglia, who has always had an affinity for pizza, it’s the perfect fit.
Getting involved with the development of the downtown community has led Agoglia to many projects, such as the Christmas celebrations through Experience Columbia, and it led him to Joe Rocco’s. He admitted that he and his fellow developers have never been in the restaurant business, but they also had never been in the ice skating business either.
“If you asked me two years ago if we were going to open a restaurant, I would’ve said, ‘no way.’ But I think it’s just part of the natural development that is happening downtown,” he said. “I think there’s going to be five restaurants downtown. I just think with the way things are heading, it’s a no brainer that downtown is going to be a destination to go eat, hang out and shop.”
While it was never a part of the vision to open a restaurant, it fits with what Agoglia and Jacob Harrison have tried to accomplish with Experience Columbia’s events downtown. They have always strived to offer food options at the events with pop-up eateries and food trucks, but they believe it will help downtown more to have a permanent option.
Agoglia lived in New York for 40 years before moving to Columbia, and he still visits the Big Apple frequently. He still has a business there, along with his houses, and stays in his own place when he visits.
When Agoglia was dating his now-wife, Yolanda, she and their daughter, Presleigh Beach, would fly to New York on Friday nights to spend the weekend. They would arrive at the John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) in Queens around 11 p.m. or midnight. On his way to JFK, he would pick up a pizza and have it sitting on the dashboard for when he picked them up.
“It became a tradition while we were dating,” he said. “When we got married, every Friday night in our house was pizza night. We always got the same thing, a grandma pizza from Umberto’s and a full-size pizza, and it just became a thing. It wasn’t because we didn’t want to cook; it was because the pizza was so good, like you looked forward to it.”
The difference between New York pizzas come down to one thing — the sauce — and Joe Rocco’s is going to use a homemade sauce from Agoglia’s family recipes.
“In New York, when you’re picking a pizzeria, what you’re really picking is the sauce,” Agoglia said. “I can go to Umberto’s, and I know exactly what that sauce tastes like. So if I want that flavor, I’m going to go there. If I want to go to Little Vincent’s downtown, that’s another different type of sauce. If I go to Guiseppe’s, that’s a very sweet sauce. What it really comes down to is those ingredients and those traditions of cooking that were passed down, even to my wife here in Mississippi.”
Agoglia’s commitment to pizza is second to none. When he travels to New York, he brings an extra suitcase just for pizza. He’s figured out the science of letting them cool in his kitchen in New York, reassembling them in the box and transporting them to Mississippi in his luggage.
“You can only get New York pizza in New York. You can only get New York pizza bagels in New York. You can go to any pizza place in New York and it’s good — it’s all good,” Agoglia said. “It also goes with the mindset that there’s no better place than New York, but I left. I feel the same way about Mississippi now. Everyone in New York thinks everyone should live there, but I think everyone should live in Mississippi. I want to raise my family here. But I do miss the traditions of my family, I miss the traditions I grew up with.”
Agoglia’s great-grandfather, Rocco, was a shepherd in Italy and immigrated to Brooklyn. His grandfather, Rocco’s son, was Joe, and his father was Joe Rocco. They have all been gone for 20 years, and opening this restaurant is a way to keep those traditions and recipes he grew up with alive. That’s what led to Agoglia landing on the name for the pizzeria, Joe Rocco’s.
He grew up eating only Italian food. In school, when his classmates were eating ham and cheese sandwiches, he was eating cold chicken and eggplant parmesan and sliced up meatballs on toast. The first few times Yolanda tried to cook Italian for Agoglia, it was very different than what he was accustomed to. But nowadays, she’s one of the best Italian cooks he knows.
“Oh my gosh, her Italian food is just unbelievable,” he said.
“It really is,” Harrison chimed in.
They lived in New York together for three years before moving to Mississippi, and Agoglia’s mom would come over and teach Yolanda how to make the recipes that have been passed down for generations.
“A big part of this restaurant is the confidence that my wife knows all the family recipes,” he said.
For the longest time, Harrison was one of the rare individuals who didn’t care for pizza. But that all changed when he finally had authentic New York pizza, which he said he couldn’t get enough of. He learned a tough lesson on his first foray into New York pizza though. Not knowing how good real pizza is, he ordered a pizza with barbecue sauce despite Agoglia attempting to persuade him to get a regular slice of cheese pizza. When they started eating, Agoglia gave Harrison a slice of his cheese pizza. In that moment, he realized his mistake as he took in the extraordinary flavors of true New York pizza, the same flavors Joe Rocco’s intends to bring to Marion County.
It will also be set up like a traditional New York pizzeria. It will have deck ovens, which cooks on very large stones, up front where the pizzas are made and a full kitchen in the back where the Italian food will be prepared. One of the deck ovens came from a pizzeria in New York where Agoglia grew up, and the other one is brand new.
“It’s going to be authentic,” Agoglia said. “I don’t want to reinvent the wheel of how pizzerias and Italian restaurants are. They’re all very much the same up there. Everywhere you go, you see those ovens and this layout.”
Getting the pizzeria up and running has taken three times longer than anticipated though. Agoglia wants to get it right and create an environment that truly feels like you’re walking into a New York pizzeria.
“Just like what we try to do with Experience Columbia, for us it’s all about the experience,” Harrison said. “Obviously, the food is going to be incredible and authentic Italian pizza, but the experience and the atmosphere is what is going to carry people (in) and get them to keep coming back.”
While creating that right atmosphere has taken time, the biggest hiccup has been the status of the building. During construction, they have encountered termite damage, wood rot, electrical issues and more. The building had to be gutted from front to back, yet even when they did that, they found more problems. The current tentative timeline would have the pizzeria opening sometime around mid-summer to early fall.
Joe Rocco’s will have three floors, with the kitchens and pizza bar on the first floor, casual dining on the second floor and private dining for events and potentially civic clubs on the top floor.
It will have quite the chef running the kitchen, too. Chef Melinda Winner has become a widely successful chef despite having rheumatoid arthritis, which can be a debilitating disease. She has won more than 50 recipe contests, appeared on the Food Network, had her own cooking show and has written multiple books.
Any resident of Marion County would be hard pressed to see one of Agoglia or Harrison around town at an event without the other by their side. They became friends as workout partners and bounced from gym to gym working out together. As their friendship grew, Agoglia convinced Harrison to come work for him, which is also how Experience Columbia came to be. When the gym they worked out together at closed last May, they decided to open their own, called Downtown Gym.
“All this stuff we’ve been involved in like Experience Columbia, the pizza place, Downtown Gym, it’s all because we just got involved and started doing something. There’s no master plan,” Agoglia said. “Experience Columbia was just the city and MCDP asked us to put some lights on a building 10 years ago. We just said, ‘OK, we’ll help.’ The gym thing, too, we helped this gentleman start his business because we liked working out there. Through a whole series of events, now there’s a state-of-the-art gym.”
Through the gym is actually how they met Chef Winner. Her future daughter-in-law was one of their trainers. When Agoglia was looking for a chef, he walked into the gym one morning at 5 a.m. and asked if anyone knew a chef. The trainer told him about Winner, and the timing couldn’t have been any better. The next day she was planning on closing on a house in Laurel, but after talking to and accepting a job from Agoglia, she moved to Columbia instead.
Not only will Joe Rocco’s be a staple downtown throughout the year, Frosty’s Eats & Treats, which has been the pop-up skate shop during the Christmas holidays, is in the works of becoming a permanent establishment as well. It will serve ice cream, gelato, pastries, desserts and maybe even cold-cut sandwiches.
Agoglia has been the man behind the curtain bringing so much joy to Marion County and the surrounding area through Experience Columbia’s downtown Christmas and New Year’s celebrations. Now, he’s bringing his Italian and New York traditions here, right in the heart of downtown. He’s already tugged at the heartstrings of the county’s residents, creating joy during the holidays for so many families. Coming soon, he’s going to be filling their stomachs with authentic, delicious food.
