LYNNFIELD — Chicken & The Pig, which opened at MarketStreet in the fall of 2022, is looking to end the chicken-sandwich wars once and for all.
“A lot of people only have a few chicken sandwiches,” owner Guy Ciolfi said. “We have around 15 different types of chicken sandwiches. You can get any type of chicken sandwich you want here.”
Ciolfi, a Lynnfield native, said he estimates he has sold roughly 60,000 sandwiches since his restaurant opened in October 2022 with a menu that also included hot dogs and bacon, and has grown to include fried pickles, pulled-pork sandwiches, and salads, along with local craft beer and wine.
According to Head Chef Randy Williams, who has been working at Chicken & The Pig since January, adding new items and recipes to the menu is one of the best parts of his job.
“We’re starting to add a lot of new things to the menu,” Williams said. “It’s exciting to be here and help it get to that next level with all the new items.”
The menu includes Williams’s own mouthwatering creation, The Vermont, a chicken sandwich with maple aioli, cheddar cheese, double-smoked bacon, lettuce, and tomato.
Before Chicken & The Pig, Williams ran a meal-prep company that folded after the pandemic. He said he knew for his next move he wanted to be somewhere he could build and experiment with the menu, which he said can sometimes mean taking a chance on a recipe whenever inspiration strikes.
“I came from doing my own thing. In my next move, I didn’t want to work for a big corporation,” Williams, a graduate of the culinary school at Johnson & Wales, said. “If I have a new idea, we could have it tomorrow.”
However, before Chicken & The Pig opened at MarketStreet in October 2022, the restaurant was a bit more mobile.
After his catering business of two decades came to a screeching halt because of the pandemic, Ciolfi and one of his former catering chefs, Joe Espinola, started to think about jumping on the growing trend of food trucks.
“It was 2020 when we started talking about it,” Ciolfi, who also went to culinary school at Johnson & Wales, said. “I said ‘What do you think of the chicken-sandwich idea?’”
In the summer of 2021, after purchasing a food truck in Maine and building the brand with his girlfriend, Jessica Collins, Ciolfi launched Chicken & The Pig as a food truck at the Lot on South Main in Middleton, selling around 2,000 chicken sandwiches a week.
“People were coming up to us saying ‘This is the best chicken sandwich I’ve ever had,’” he said.
By the end of the first season of running the food truck, Ciolfi said he knew that he had to take the idea to the next level and looked at the space at MarketStreet in the fall of 2021.
“I can’t just survive with a food truck,” Ciolfi said. “I needed something else.”
Ciolfi would go on to acquire the restaurant’s current space in 2022, and began work on the restaurant as the food truck enjoyed another successful summer in 2022. The food truck will continue operating in 2023.
Ciolfi teamed up with Collins to design the space, which includes a simple and sleek interior featuring a Chicken & The Pig mural and an Order Here sign made out of reclaimed wood. The restaurant even has outdoor seating.
According to Ciolfi, the restaurant’s simple aesthetic matches its no-frills food-truck roots.
“We designed this place basically off of the food truck,” he said. “The cool thing about our concept is that it’s pretty simple. The menu is real small, we cross-utilize a lot of different ingredients.”
Ciolfi said Bird is The Word is the restaurant’s signature sandwich, and is very similar to a traditional chicken-sandwich recipe.
However, he said when it comes to the chicken-sandwich wars, the chicken sandwich that is made fresh is the one that is best.
“It’s just not the same,” he said.
