Just a few weeks after turning 90, Helen L. Coleman, who spent decades cooking soul food for generations of Seattleites at several different restaurants, died on Saturday, November 29, report the Seattle Times and the Seattle Met.
Coleman was born in Texas in 1935 and raised by her grandmother in Oklahoma and Los Angeles. In 1970, she moved to Seattle and opened her first restaurant, Helen’s Diner, on Union Street near 23rd Avenue, in the heart of the historically Black Central District. It became known around town for its “Mount St. Helen’s Burger,” a mountain-sized dish that the Times later described as “a beef patty topped by hot links, two strips of bacon, lettuce, tomato, cheese, onion, and one egg, sunny side up.” The runny yolk made the burger volcano-esque, Coleman told the paper: “It erupted.”
Helen’s Diner also served classic soul food — oxtail, pork chops, Coleman’s celebrated candied yams — to a neighborhood that embraced both the woman and her restaurant. Ebony Magazine dubbed Helen’s “The principal Seattle motherlode of soul food.” The Met writes:
Massive support from the community, including the president of the neighboring Liberty Bank, allowed the restaurant to expand in 1975. The local sports teams were regulars, Black community leaders met there, contractors and painters came in for a pre-shift breakfast; anyone looking for the best soul food in town regularly stopped by.
But the business fell on hard times in the ’80s and Coleman filed for bankruptcy protection and closed in 1983. For a few years she cooked at the nearby Deano’s Cafe and Lounge, then opened a new restaurant, Ms. Helen’s Soul Food, in 1987, just a few steps away from her original diner. “She decorated the place with potted plants, pictures, lace, cooking utensils, and more, the TV always on in the background just as at Helen’s Diner,” writes the Times. As she did at Helen’s Diner, Coleman served Black celebrities from near and far: Gary Payton and Ken Griffey Jr. were fans, with Coleman once telling the Times that the Mariners star “didn’t eat vegetables.”
In 2001, the Nisqually earthquake damaged the Ms. Helen’s building so badly that it was condemned. The restaurant closed, and Coleman became the Odyesseus of the Seattle dining scene, with her daughter Jesdarnel “Squirt” Henton working by her side. She did catering for Microsoft, she worked at the Silver Fork in Rainier Valley, and Rose Petals on MLK, and Deano’s again, which became Club Chocolate City and then closed after losing its liquor license in 2007.
Coleman effectively retired after that, though for years she and her daughter attempted to open a third restaurant, dubbed Ms. Helen’s Soul Bistro. In 2015, it was announced that Ms. Helen’s would open inside the sleek new Midtown Square development at 23rd and Union. But after repeated delays, it became clear in 2023 that the idea would never come to fruition: Henton and Coleman couldn’t raise the capital required to operate a 3,000-square-foot restaurant. “The money is just not there,” Henton told Eater Seattle at the time.
Henton continued operating a catering business, and the Seattle Medium reported last year that one of her clients, a Harley-Davidson dealership in Renton, was so taken with the food it let Henton open a cafe inside the business. Henton works there today with her daughter, Nicole Helene, reports the Met.
That displacement from the Central District to the suburbs mirrors the broader story of Seattle’s Black community, which has largely been pushed out of the CD by years of gentrification; in 2020, KUOW noted that just 15 percent of the neighborhood’s residents were Black, down from nearly 75 percent in the ’70s, during the heyday of Helen’s Diner.
The CD remains a hub for Black culture, however. Communion, likely Seattle’s most famous soul food restaurant, now occupies a space on that same corner of where Coleman’s restaurants once stood. And though Ms. Helen’s Soul Food Bistro never opened, Midtown Square is home to several Black-owned businesses, including the recently revived Marjorie and Jerk Shack Kitchen, whose owner, Trey Lamont, grew up in the neighborhood. For the time being, Soul food still has a home on 23rd and Union.