Every Day of the Year, He Sat Down at 5:15

A Wednesday dinner party, a row of tin garages, forty-nine winters of staying open — and an ending nobody in town saw coming.

Somewhere between five and a quarter past, every day, the man the restaurant was named for came out and took his seat at the bar and had a martini. Not most days. Not in season. Every day of the year, so reliably that people who worked with him described setting a watch by it.

That is roughly the correct entry point for Napi's, because Napi's was never really a restaurant that opened and closed on a schedule. It was a house that served dinner.

It began as a Wednesday night dinner party. Anton Van Dereck Haunstrup — Napi — and his wife, Helen, cooked for musicians and painters and whoever else turned up at their cottage, and people ate and played and came back the next Wednesday. That is not a business plan. It became one anyway.

They built it out of garages

The building was a row of tin auto garages. Napi and Helen bought the Freeman Street property in 1973 and spent two years turning it into a room, working with the master craftsman Bob Baker and a rotating crowd of friends, out of reclaimed and salvaged material. The restaurant opened on June 27, 1975.

What went inside came from their own lives. Antiques out of the shop they used to run. Stained glass. Tribal masks. Carousel horses. A topographic codfish over the entrance and the Eye of Horus for a logo, because Napi had traveled to Egypt and Palestine as a child and never quite came back from it.

The art on the walls was by people who lived here — bought, over decades, from artists Napi knew personally. Conrad Malicoat laid one of his earliest brick "breakthroughs" around the restroom entrance, brick pushed into shapes brick does not make. Jackson Lambert painted an Arctic scene onto a suspended cold-air duct, on the theory that a duct overhead is a surface like any other.

People called it as much museum as restaurant. The staff were expected to keep up. David Gips, who hosted there for nearly thirty seasons, put the job plainly: "We all learned the lore behind the art. If somebody asked, 'Who painted that?,' we had to know."

Helen cooked

Helen was the restaurant's first chef, and what she put on the menu is why the place never fit any category cleanly — international cooking running alongside Cape Cod food, the Middle Eastern thread from Napi's childhood laid over a town that mostly served fish.

The bouillabaisse is the dish people name. One customer's memory of it is a woman coming through a snowstorm to get a bowl, which tells you two things: what the bouillabaisse meant, and that Napi's was open in a snowstorm.

That second part is the underrated fact of the whole operation. This is a town that goes dark. Napi's ran year-round for forty-nine years, with live music most nights and staff who stayed twenty and thirty years, and in February it was a lit room with people in it. Whatever else it was, it was the place that did not leave.

Then it stopped

Napi's closed in September 2024, about nine months short of fifty years.

Napi had died on Christmas Day, 2019. Helen died on January 29, 2025. In the years between, the estate was in the local news repeatedly over tenant disputes, evictions, housing conditions, and Board of Health enforcement actions involving some of its residential properties — a hard chapter, thoroughly reported by the Provincetown Independent, and part of the record of these buildings.

And then the ending nobody expected.

On October 29, 2025, the restaurant at 7 Freeman Street passed, under the Van Derecks' estate plans, to the Center for Coastal Studies — the Provincetown outfit that cuts whales loose from fishing gear. Two neighboring properties went with it: the roughly 1850 house at 5 Freeman with five apartments, and a house and cottage at 7 Standish. Provincetown's FY2026 assessments put the three at about $8.51 million together. The Provincetown Art Association and Museum was left 358 works from the couple's collection, roughly 150 of which had arrived by 2020. The Cape Cod Children's Place in Eastham received $200,000.

The Center has said very little, and carefully. In December 2025, Executive Director Anne-Marie Runfola said the first steps were assessing the buildings, addressing safety, and hiring a property manager; the five apartments were occupied at the time. "We just had our first working group meeting," she told the Independent. No public announcement of a long-term plan has followed.

The part that can't be packed

Much of the movable interior was cleared after the closing — some into storage, some distributed under the will. The masks and the carousel horses and the paintings are the kind of thing an estate can sort.

The brick is not. Neither is the duct. Malicoat's breakthrough and Lambert's Arctic scene were built into the room rather than hung in it, and their long-term fate has not been publicly announced.

Which leaves a marine research nonprofit holding the deed to a room that a man built out of garages so his Wednesday dinner party would have somewhere to sit.

Two Februaries have now come and gone with that room dark. It used to be the one that wasn't.

Napi's | 7 Freeman St., Provincetown
Open June 27, 1975 – September 2024. Transferred to the Center for Coastal Studies, October 29, 2025.