Len Cabral, a well-known storyteller, is getting into a new line of work: café operator.
Cabral, his brother Ali, and former state police trooper Herman “Buddy” Snead purchased the Westminster Street building formerly occupied by Providence Black Repertory Company in December. Now they’re renting it to the revived Providence Inner City Arts, a nonprofit the Cabrals helped establish decades ago.
As a revenue generator, PICA has opened the Roots Café on the ground floor of 276 Westminster St., and Len and Ali Cabral are heavily involved. PICA has hired Leah Reynolds, former owner of the Custom House and Everyman, as manager, and Reza Clifton as artistic director.
Len Cabral talked recently about PICA’s plans for the Roots Café.
PBN: What will PICA do differently to prevent what happened to the Black Rep, which went into receivership in 2009, from happening to the Roots Café?
CABRAL: I don’t know the inner workings of it, but for whatever reason [the Black Rep] wasn’t able to hold on. But Providence Inner City Arts, we’re one of the oldest arts organizations in the state. We’ve balanced our books from the very beginning in the early ’70s when we first started. We were able to do events and not lose our shirts, and we developed relationships with performers and musicians and visual artists who wanted Providence to be something better.
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PBN: PICA is a nonprofit, but the café is a business. So what are you doing to get people through the doors?
CABRAL: [When the Black Rep owned the space] it wasn’t open during the daytime. It was open in the evenings, and maybe four evenings a week. We intend on being open during the day. This is a café where people can come and gather, have lunch, coffee in the morning, entertainment during the day. We’ll have people doing poetry or classical music. We want to attract people during the daytime, and we want diverse evening entertainment, attracting not just the young people, not just students, but we want to attract people from outside the city of Providence. So we’ll be doing events that start at 8 p.m. because people my age, most of us, want to be home by 11:30 p.m. … We want to focus on bringing people into Providence that haven’t been here in awhile. … On top of that, there are a lot of people who live downtown now – they can just walk here.
CABRAL: We want to make it diverse. We want to have things to attract the students, reggae evenings, blues jams, jazz that will attract an older crowd. Some big-name jazz groups. We’re close enough to New York and Boston – a lot of these musicians are driving through Rhode Island. … We can be a place where some well-known jazz groups can play on their way back to New York City.
PBN: Aside from entertainment, coffee and a bar, what else will the Roots Café offer?
CABRAL: There will be a menu. The catering program at RISD will be catering. They’ve already come a few times. … We don’t have a kitchen as of yet, but eventually we hope to. …
[Customers] will be able to get coffee; there will be sandwiches and salads. … If an office across the street says they want to come over for a lunch meeting, we can tell our caterer what they want. We’re looking for the business community to have meetings here; we can cater to that. We’re also looking for when people get out of work, instead of racing to their car and heading into traffic, come here and have a cup of coffee or an after-work drink. …
Eventually, we’ve going to use upstairs, too. … Upstairs we want to have a black-box theater. There will be studio space for artists. It’s big enough for a ballroom dance. We’ll have workshops and music lessons for inner-city kids.
CABRAL: The building is owned by a holding company, Bali Holdings, that is my brother, Ali, myself and Herman “Buddy” Snead. It’s a for-profit. We bought the building in December. It was a long process because it was in receivership. They had an auction. … We found out about it and put an offer in for it. We’re leasing it to Providence Inner City Arts, a nonprofit. The beauty of the Black Rep being here is it was always a nonprofit. And they were bringing diversity into downtown. Now we offer that diversity. The city was losing a very vibrant space when Black Rep closed.
We said, “this is a good investment,” right in downtown Providence. It’s not just a financial commitment, it’s been sweat. We’ve done a lot of work on this building.
PBN: How did you make that work, as far as financing?
CABRAL: Between the three of us, we were able to come up with enough money for a down payment. We had faith in ourselves and in the business aspects that it will generate enough money.
PBN: These days, faith can only get you so far with bankers. Was there a lending institution involved?
CABRAL: Privately we were able to get enough funding, with our own credit, to be able to put this together.
PBN: The Black Rep was a key host of the popular Sound Session music festival. Any plans to continue that tradition?
CABRAL: Yes, we’re going to be doing Sound Session. It won’t be the large Sound Session that took place the previous years because we want to be wise and start off small and grow into it. It will be this July in some way or form. It won’t be a citywide event but music around this building and inside here. We’re in no rush to bite off more than we can chew. •
INTERVIEW
Len Cabral
POSITION: Storyteller, and partner in Bali Holdings LLC, and member of the nonprofit Providence Inner City Arts
BACKGROUND: Cabral is a professional storyteller who helped establish the nonprofit Providence Inner City Arts decades ago, playing a key role in the group’s annual Florentine Faire in Providence until the yearly event ended in 1985 after fire destroyed the group’s costumes, props and sets. Cabral also co-owned an antiques store, Inna Cidy Solarium, off Wickenden Street in Providence for several years.
EDUCATION: North Providence High School
FIRST JOB: Delivering the Evening Bulletin in North Providence at age 11
RESIDENCE: Cranston
AGE: 63
