In “Good Will Hunting,” Matt Damon ’92 shares a late-night pickle with his love interest. Behind them, a red sign spelling out “Tasty” glows neon in the window.
Although it is unfamiliar to students now, the Tasty Diner, a 24/7 hole-in-the-wall sandwich shop, was once an all-hours gathering place for Cambridge residents and Harvard students.
“You know, we’re old, we were all around before social media. You needed spots where you could find each other. And if you were out late at night, the Tasty was a good option,” Chris W. Moore ’89 recalls.
Now, CVS stands in the Tasty’s place, and El Jefe’s Taqueria has overtaken the small diner as the de facto late-night Harvard haunt. Students today associate “Tasty” with Tasty Burger, the Boston burger chain located down the street. Yet alumni and Cambridge residents have found ways to preserve their memories of the Harvard Square watering hole.
In 1997, renovations conducted by the Cambridge Savings Bank forced the Tasty to close after 81 years in business. When he heard it was shutting down, Moore, a producer of “Good Will Hunting,” pushed for the Tasty to be immortalized as a backdrop in the movie.
“It literally was the worst place ever to shoot because it’s tiny,” Moore explains, describing the diner’s cramped 12-seat arrangement. The scene was shot during the daytime, when it was less hectic. “I’m glad it’s on film somewhere,” Moore says.
But “Good Will Hunting” was not the only film to portray the Tasty. Cambridge local Federico Muchnik preserved snapshots of the diner’s night-to-night life in his documentary “Touching History: Harvard Square, The Bank, and The Tasty Diner.”
Muchnik captured the space in unfiltered vitality in a documentary that Tasty-goers could hold on to even as the neighborhood morphed. In the weeks before the shop’s closing, Muchnik would order a couple of hot dogs, sit in the corner of the room, and begin to film. He trained his camera on the Tasty’s liveliness: the cooks jovially teasing customers, the never-ending conversation, the constant patter of clattering silverware.
Cambridge residents and Harvard students alike were loath to lose the gathering spot.
“I documented the taking apart of the Tasty, and that was a pretty emotional day for many people,” Muchnik says. Cambridge activists railed against the diner’s removal, protesting at City Hall, all of which Muchnik captures in his film. The Tasty, he says, was a “crossroads place because it was open and it was accessible and nobody judged you.”
Muchnik remembers the Tasty was a place of spontaneous togetherness, where unhoused people, Harvard students and professors, and working-class Cambridge locals convened on equal footing. A map of pins on the wall traced customers’ origins and travels. Hearing the stories of other customers’ travels, Muchnik says, felt like traveling with them. There was something transporting about the Tasty.
“If you were there, you were part of the Tasty community,” Nick P. D’Arienzo Jr. ’83 says. “You were in Harvard Square. You were in Cambridge. You weren’t really at Harvard anymore.” He “fell in love” with the establishment, he says. “I found I didn’t want to dress as preppy the more I went. It’s like we cared more about fitting in at the Tasty than about fitting in at Harvard.”
Harvard alumni who frequented the burger joint carry a sort of oral history of Tasty stories. Almost every person we interviewed sent us the names of more friends, promising fresh fables.
Many tell stories of Charles Coney, the diner’s central figure and cook, who…
