MERIDEN - Rice bread from the health food store that's as hard as a rock, an end to dining out with friends and family, and the knowledge that you'll never again enjoy a fresh-baked pizza from your favorite restaurant - a diagnosis of Celiac Disease can be hard to bear, as Angala Ferrigno can tell you.

"I'm Italian," the 30-year-old Cromwell resident said Thursday. "I've tried almost every gluten free pizza I can try."

They never match up to the New York City pizzas she remembers savoring as a child, she said, but the gluten-free pepperoni pizza she had just dined on at Illiano's Ristorante and Pizzeria, 510 W Main St., was delicious, and as close to the real deal as she's gotten.

"It was nice and chewy and not crumbly, she said.

The nicest part was that she could actually go to a restaurant and eat out instead of having to make it herself for fear of gluten contamination, she said.

It's people like Ferrigno that Illiano's owner Vincent Scileppi is hoping to get into his restaurants by stocking gluten-free pizza crusts and promising to make pizzas in a gluten-free environment.

The Meriden and Middletown branches of the restaurant already stock the gluten-free pizza crusts, and be-cause of their success there they'll be expanded to the other seven branches soon, he said.

He's gotten calls from people with celiac disease thanking him for serving the pizzas, Scileppi, but those people also bring in their friends and family, so he sells more regular pizzas as well.

The crusts are made in a special gluten-free facility in Bridgeport run by Still Riding Pizza to make sure that it's not contaminated by flour from regular pizzas at the restaurant.

The crusts are decked out with segregated sauces and ingredients in the restaurant's freezer, and cooked on a raised tray to keep it above any contamination in the oven itself. Finally, it's cut with a special cutter only used for gluten-free pizza.

The 13-inch pizzas cost $15.95, said Meriden branch general manager Darrell Lucas, but there's not extra cost for extra toppings. People can choose as many as they like- excluding meatballs and eggplant of course, because these contain flour.