Between 5:00 and 5:30 pm 7 days a week, 365 days a year, Ivan Giusti pulls into his reserved parking spot in front of City Hall and springs into well-rehearsed action.
First, the 48 year-old co-owner of the Haven Brothers Diner, plugs the truck into the 70-year-old outlet on a nearby street lamp.
Two blinding bulbs illuminate plastic tables that provide seating, or dance props, for the diner’s late night customers and the pulsing blue and red OPEN sign comes to life.
The diner is ready for business.
In the time of Covid-19 where connection is rare and many businesses have folded, Haven Brothers Diner continues its 128-year-long tradition of providing food and community for anyone and everyone in downtown Providence.
Around 5:35, Ivan, wearing the diner’s black cotton t-shirt and cargo shorts, unlocks, unfolds and then climbs the truck’s collapsible stairs.
“Go ahead,” he says. “Ask me anything.”
The Rhode Island native has been working for his father’s diner in some capacity for 35 years.
Ivan has seen a full life cycle of customers pass through the truck.
“College kids come, twenty-some year old club-go-ers come,” Ivan explains. “Then they grow older, get married, and then come back to reminisce.”
As if on queue, a young couple climbs the diner steps.
Four years ago, after they got married at the Providence Public Library, Doyle, a Boston native, and her husband went out for drinks with friends.
It was late but the couple knew they needed to make one last stop.
They came to Haven Brothers Diner.
Because, says Doyle, “it’s a quintessential Providence thing to do.”
Four years later, on a Wednesday evening, they are back, recreating their wedding night.
Doyle’s husband pulls out his phone to show a faded picture.
“We had agreed that before we went back, I wanted a picture of both of us: me in my wedding dress and my husband in a tuxedo eating hot dogs in front of the truck,” said Doyle.
Sure enough the photo shows two beaming twenty-some year olds under the glare of the diner’s lights, trying to stuff hot dogs into their mouths while keeping their wedding garb clean.
You can imagine the diner’s usual late night crowd cheering the couple on from behind the camera, their hoots and hollers adding to the nightly Kennedy Plaza symphony of traffic and the diner’s quintessential near heavy metal rock music.
As the giddy couple recounts their special night, Ivan is unfazed.
“Yeah, that happens all the time.”
The truck has been part of Providence nightlife since 1893 when immigrant Ann P. Haven first bought a horse-pulled wagon and converted it to a lunch cart that she named Haven Brothers.
Back then, the cart provided late night sustenance to the workers of the 15,000 plus Providence factories of the 1890s.
Though the cart became a truck in the 1950s, it continues to serve late night Providence.
57-year-old spin instructor and self-described “original Providence person,” Lori Mars, remembers a childhood tradition of Saturday night diner visits.
“It was a me and my father thing,” Mars says. “After driving my grandmother home, my dad would play cards and I would stay up because I knew we would go get Haven Brothers after.”
Mars first went to the diner in the 1970s when she was about 8 years old.
Downtown Providence was different then.
“When I grew up, there weren’t many restaurants to go to and the economy was bad.” she explains. “It was a different climate, kind of seedy.”
Haven Brothers, the diner on wheels parked in front of City Hall, was at the center of it.
“To go on that truck was really weird, so I liked it,” Mars says. “It was full of creatures-of-the-night type people.”
Sal Giusti, Ivan’s father and the owner of the diner, agrees.
“Everybody comes here: doctors, lawyers, homeless people,” says Sal. “There’s never a dull moment.”
Sal moved to West Warwick from Italy 50 years ago.
Though he had always wanted his own business, Sal didn’t attempt to start one until he was laid off from the Cranston Chemical Company.
“Before I was afraid to quit because I had three kids,” Sal remembers. “But they fired me at the right time and I decided to buy the truck.”
In 1986, the same year that Sal bought Haven Brothers, former Providence Mayor Joseph R. Paulino Jr. decided to move the diner.
“Haven Bros. was attracting some groups of motorcyclists and gangs into the area,” Paolino Jr. explains in the diner’s documentary The Original Food Truck: Haven Brothers: Legacy of the American Diner. “It was disruptive.”
As Mars explained, in the 1970s, Providence struggled economically and became increasingly violent as jobs left the area.
“In the 80s and 90s there were fights every weekend,” Ivan remembers.
As more clubs opened up in downtown Providence, many drunken arguments spilled over into the only open restaurant; Haven Brothers.
“It’s not our fault,” Ivan says. “But maybe that’s why the mayor wanted to move us.”
Paolino Jr. forced them to move during summer, the truck’s busiest time.
“It was crazy,” Ivan remembers. “We had no business.”
The Giusti family took the issue to court with the help of Paolino Jr.’s successor as mayor, Buddy Cianci.
“He helped us get back here because he knew that this is Providence,” Ivan says. “It’s historic and you can’t move something that’s historic.”
The people of Providence agreed.
One citizen wrote in the Providence Journal: “That diner has been a fixture in downtown Providence longer than the mayor [Paolino Jr.] has, and will, we hope, be one long after the mayor is gone.”
“Part of city life is and ought to be the juxtaposition of disparate elements that all come together to give a city its flavor,” another wrote. “At Haven Brothers, all elements rub elbows, and all contribute to the mix that gives the city its particular ambience.”
Paolino Jr. realized his mistake and tried to save face before the next election.
“He threw a 100th anniversary party in the plaza, but it wasn’t the 100th anniversary,” Ivan says about the 1988 celebration, five years before the true centennial.
Paolino Jr.’s attempt to move the truck marked the first of Sal’s trials as the diner’s owner.
In 1989, Sal’s business partner passed away, leaving him to run the diner alone.
“The first ten years, I worked seven days a week,” Sal says. “I would wake up at 11 am and go to work.”
Often, he would come home past 3 am.
Now, at 78, Sal insists on coming into his truck about once a week, even if it’s just to deliver ice cream.
Around 6 pm, a low two-seater car pulls off the main road and parks right in front of City Hall.
Ivan looks up, “My weiner guy is here.”
‘Weiner guy’ is Monte Ferris Sr., the owner of the local family business, Venus De Milo.
Ferris has been coming to the diner for over fifteen years.
Giusti asks: “Three or four today?”
“Three,” Ferris responds. “With mucho salsa, on the top, bottom and sides.”
After a well-rehearsed routine of business banter, during which Ivan never stops grilling or wrapping or slicing, Ferris takes his hot dogs and drives away.
On most nights, the truck slows down for the next several hours.
In these quiet moments, when the three stools in the back of the truck sit unoccupied, the music is audible, and the TV that hangs on the back wall is unobstructed, the truck begins to tell its story.
Pictures of famous customers, Bruce Springsteen, Federico Castelluccio, LL Cool J, among others line the diner’s back wall.
The photos flow right into a black and white timeline of the truck’s history.
And tucked in the corner sits a framed 2014 Providence Phoenix article with a picture of Sal leaning out the diner’s service window, titled “The Heart of the City.”
It’s in this quiet that Ivan’s nonchalance slips for the first time, as he remembers his first few months at the diner.
Because Sal was so overwhelmed in the diner’s early years, he put his kids to work as soon as possible.
Ivan started working in the kitchen at thirteen and on the truck by fifteen. At the time, he was far from his current unflappable, multi-tasking self.
“I was a shy kid, and I had a stutter,” Ivan chooses his words carefully. “I didn’t want to talk or upsell things, but my dad didn’t care.”
He shrugs and says, “He’s hardcore because he’s a worker.”
With that, Ivan returns to the grill to prepare burgers for that night’s rush.
Around 8 pm, the people start coming, and they don’t stop.
Luckily, the diner’s schedule is built for this.
Reinforcements arrive in the form of Cassandra Grimaldi, a short woman with dark hair pulled into a tight ponytail who wears her Haven Brothers t-shirt with a small cut down the front.
The 38-year-old mother of three has worked at Haven Brothers for the last ten years.
Though Grimaldi paused her college career when she got pregnant, she is determined to go back.
“I always said I’d never die without a degree,” says Grimaldi.
She wants to study psychology.
For now, she studies it unofficially through her nightly encounters on the truck.
A homeless woman stands outside the truck around 10 pm on a Thursday.
“She won’t tell me her full name,” says Grimaldi. “But every time she comes, she gets a cherry coke. Usually she pays the whole amount.”
Sometimes, as was the case that Thursday, the woman is a little short on change.
“No worries, it’ll go on credit. Pay me back next time,” Grimaldi says as she delivers the coke.
Each time the woman returns, Grimaldi pretends to forget to ask for the money.
“I just take two dollars from my own tips,” she says. “I’d rather go to heaven than hell and it’s just a cherry coke.”
Around 10:30 pm on a Saturday, a balding man in ragged clothes wanders up to the diner’s collapsible outdoor tables. He blasts music on a speaker and intermittently gets up to dance or to proclaim loudly the importance of gospel.
A woman with gray hair sits next to him, smoking a cigarette in silence.
Twenty minutes later, a group of five nicely dressed teenagers bound over to their table and each teenager takes a turn exchanging a long, tight hug with the man.
One of them walks towards the truck and shouts over his shoulder “Let me get you a shake.”
The man doesn’t respond but mumbles that he doesn’t know what’s in that stuff that makes it so damn good.
This unlikely group of seven; diverse in clothing and age, sits together, under the diner’s bright lights for forty five laughter-filled minutes before wandering separately back into the night.
Around 11 pm, a formally dressed young couple occupies the other table.
Suddenly, the young man shouts something incoherent at two women in sports bras and leggings.
They turn.
The families and couples in line pause their chatter, and for a moment the interaction could go in any direction.
Fifteen minutes later they’re all sitting around the table, having shared names and a cigarette.
Classic Haven Brothers.
The truck’s location by Kennedy Plaza and its late hours enable it to be an unique place of exchange.
Ironically, one of the biggest champions of this exchange is Linda Verhulst, Paolino Jr.’s former secretary.
“It’s a riot,” Verhurlst says. “I enjoy the combination of people.”
Verhuslt worked at City Hall for over a decade, and her many late nights gave her ample opportunity to observe the truck.
But instead of the violence her boss reported, Verhuslt saw a uniquely safe community.
“You can relax and enjoy, everyone gets along,” Verhurst says. “You couldn’t see that as easily at noontime at Kennedy Plaza as you could at midnight at Haven Brothers.”
Grimaldi agrees.
In fact, she feels safer as a woman working at Haven Brothers than she did in previous jobs.
“My first job years ago was at a well known company. I made lots of money but I experienced sexual harassment,” Grimaldi remembers.
Grimaldi is so confident in the truck’s safe environment that she allows her 15-year-old daughter Adriana to work there.
Adriana has been working at the diner for two months, and her favorite part is seeing people’s reactions when she gives them food.
“Every night someone tells me they love me,” she says.
Her response?
She gives a classic Haven Brother shrug and says with a big smile, “I love you too.”
When Adriana was 8-years-old, those making the documentary about the diner asked her if she wanted to work there.
“I said I didn’t want to,” Adriana remembers. “But of course I did, who wouldn’t want to?”
Tom Field, another diner employee, feels similarly.
“I love it, love my job,” he says.
Field is the one who created the back wall tribute of famous diner visitors. His broad build and proud smile stand out in nearly every single photo.
“When I first started eight years ago there was nothing on the walls,” Field shares. “I injected the decoration.”
The father of three encouraged the addition of the diner’s TV and acts as the truck’s unofficial DJ.
“I also added the milkshake flavors,” Field says. “We had seven to eight flavors, and I told Ivan we could do better.”
Haven Brothers now has 160 flavors.
Field’s vision for the diner is an extension of his other work as an artist.
“I make cement statues,” Field says. “Big ones, like 18th century English garden planters and urns.”
He hopes to launch a business soon but in the meantime will keep working on biggering and bettering the truck.
Around 11:30pm on a Saturday, Field’s silhouette fills the diner’s narrow entrance.
“You were asking about my least favorite parts of the job?” he says. “When people do stupid shit like this.”
He approaches the crowd outside the diner and asks each group; “You haven’t seen a credit card reader have you?”
For the rest of the night, the truck’s well-oiled routine is slowed down as Field inputs each person’s credit card number manually.
Another Wednesday they are slowed down by the blender not working. And another Thursday by the outlet not quite plugging into the lamp post. One day, the usual parking spot is even obstructed by the police.
Each challenge is met with a signature shrug and a re-adjustment.
This adaptability is key to the diner’s success.
The COVID-19 pandemic was just one more test of the truck’s resilience, especially in the beginning.
“It was crappy,” Field says. “It was slow and people were afraid.”
The truck was particularly vulnerable because most of its business, 70%, Ivan estimates, comes from people going to the clubs.
“When the clubs shut, for the first month, we were dead,” Ivan says.
But they adapted.
“We relied heavily on Uber Eats and Grubhub,” Ivan says. “After the first month it picked up again.”
Ivan credits the truck’s dependability with its survival.
“We’re established,” he says. “Our reputation saved us.”
Grimaldi explains that the truck is consistent because it has to be.
“We’re working for the future of our kids and him,” she says pointing to Ivan. “It’s family. We want it to do well.”
The diner employees’ commitment to keeping their door open to anyone at any time has allowed it to survive Providence’s deindustrialization, Paolino Jr. ‘s attempt to move it, and, now, COVID.
In turn, the truck has been able to provide food, shelter and warmth for the people of Providence, 365 days a year for over a century.
Grimaldi once said Haven Brothers isn’t a place where people feel welcome, it’s a place where they are welcome.
Field summarizes the diner best.
More than a food truck, landmark, or even memory: “It’s a Haven.”
Sole Magazine