Before Hook n Ladder Pizza Co. had a building on Post Road, it had a fire truck.
The idea started during COVID. Shawn Finnigan and the people around him converted a full-size fire engine into a mobile wood-fired pizzeria and took it on the road.
For more than five years, Hook N Ladder worked festivals, community events, charity events and fundraisers around Rhode Island. By 2025, it had won a Motif Food Truck Award four years running.
This month, the truck finally got a permanent address.
2283 Post Road in Warwick.
You can't miss it.
Engine 76 is parked out front, ladders still mounted along the side, Hook N Ladder Pizza on the door.
Inside, the firehouse came with it.
Turnout coats hang on the walls. Helmets, axes and firefighting equipment fill the room. A red Maltese cross glows near the windows. Big red booths line the walls, with tables, TVs and a long bar down one side.
My brother is a retired firefighter, so I have a special place in my heart for all of it.
But a fire truck parked outside doesn't make a pizza place worth coming back to.
The pizza does.So I had to check it out.
We kept our first order simple.
One 14-inch pie. Half cheese. Half pepperoni.
The pizzaiolo asked if we wanted it more well done.
I told him no.
Give me your regular bake.
If I'm trying a pizza for the first time, I want to eat it the way they make it before I start telling them how I want it.
They make the dough and sauce in house, daily. We were told the dough typically gets a 72-hour fermentation before it goes into the Forza Forni wood-fired oven.
The crust came out light, soft and chewy, with blistering and patches of char around the edge.
The sauce was tasty and held its own underneath the cheese, which melted nicely across the pie. The pepperoni curled into little cups, crisp around the edges with rendered oil collecting in the middle.
But the cheese half told me more.
It didn't need anything else.
That's also what keeps everything else about Hook N Ladder from becoming a gimmick.
And they commit to the theme.
Smoke Eater. Backdraft Hawaiian. 5-Alarm Supreme. Fully Involved. Turnout gear on the walls. Firehouse red everywhere. An actual fire engine parked outside.
If the pizza wasn't good, none of that would save it.
The pizza is good.
So Hook N Ladder doesn't feel like somebody invented a firehouse restaurant and went looking for something to serve.
It feels like a pizza business that spent years operating out of a fire truck finally found a building to call home.
Right now, they've been open about two weeks.
There were empty booths. Open seats at the bar. More room than people.
That's the brutal part about opening a restaurant. Building it doesn't make people walk through the door. Neither does making good pizza.
First, they have to know you're there.
When Hook N Ladder opened, one of the people helping with that wasn't Shawn.
It was another Warwick pizza maker.
Joe's Pizza RI publicly congratulated Shawn and his family and told its own customers to go check them out.
Two businesses selling pizza in the same city, and one is telling people to spend their money with the other.
That's the RI: The Pizza State community I know.
And we're coming back.
They've got the room for us.
They've got the pizza.
After more than five years of taking that fire truck wherever the people were, maybe it's our turn to go to them.
The truck is parked.
The oven is hot.
Let's fill the room. read more