Remembering Ms. Helen Coleman, Queen of Seattle Soul Food

Helen Coleman fed Seattle’s soul. She fed soul food to the children of the Central District and the late-night club crowds on Madison. She fed Richard Pryor and Muhammad Ali when they visited, and she fed hometown celebrities Ernestine Anderson, Gary Payton, and Ken Griffey Jr. She greeted everyone with a warm “Hey baby,” and filled them up with oxtails and catfish and collard greens. On November 29, the woman known as Ms. Helen passed away three weeks after her 90th birthday.

Born in Texas and raised in Oklahoma City, Coleman lived in Los Angeles before moving to Seattle in 1970 and opening her first restaurant, Helen’s Diner, on Union, just south of 23rd. For four decades, she smothered pork chops and baked sweet potato pie with a loving gruffness, her daughter Jesdarnel Henton cooking by her side. “Anybody who was anybody came through there,” Henton said in 2021 conversation.

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.

When financial troubles shuttered the restaurant in the early '80s, Coleman cooked out of nearby Deano’s Cafe and Lounge until she managed to open Ms. Helen’s Soul Food, just across the intersection from her original. That’s where Ali came to eat, that’s where Griffey rang up for a bunch of peach cobblers to send down to the Mariners. “We had a wall of people that just was there all the time,” Henton remembered.

The 2001 Nisqually earthquake left the building condemned, and Ms. Helen never had her own restaurant again. But she didn’t stop cooking: First, she worked in catering for Microsoft, then made her way back to Deano’s, later Club Chocolate City. In 2010, Seattle Met contributor Angela Garbes wrote an ode to the food there.

It was here in 2003 that I first found Ms. Helen’s food, the gold standard for all the soul food I’ll ever have in my life. Fried pork chops, sheathed in a generously salted and peppered crackly crust, remained juicy and ever-so-slightly-pink in the middle. Corn cakes, savory golden pancakes with a delightful cornmeal crunch, had a startlingly fluffy texture, and black-eyed peas were minerally, firm and satisfying to the teeth. But all that paled in comparison to Ms. Helen’s oxtails, braised for an eternity so that the meat was meltingly tender and barely clinging to the bone, then served in a satiny sauce of their own braising liquid—a rich, flavorful, and straightforward brown gravy.

Those oxtails are the epitome of what I think of as soul food—not just Southern food, which includes both barbecue and Cajun/Creole food—but soul food, a cuisine whose culinary roots are firmly rooted in slavery. Slaves were fed very cheaply, so they made do with what they had: turnip tops and wild thick greens, discarded cuts of meat like pigs’ ears, oxtail and chitterlings, which all require heart, time and careful, loving cooking to become delicious.

Other than a few brief stints and helping Henton with catering, Ms. Helen’s cooking career ended when the city shut down the club in 2007. Coleman and Henton struggled for decades to get and keep funding for their businesses as the gentrification of the Central District made it more difficult and expensive for Black entrepreneurs. Henton spent nearly all of the last decade trying to open her own restaurant there.

Since late last year, Henton has carried on Ms. Helen’s recipes from a counter inside the Jet City Harley-Davidson in Renton, alongside her own daughter, Nicole Helene (named for her grandmother). But, as Garbes’s words show, few who tasted Ms. Helen’s magic have ever stopped thinking about it. “Can’t nobody do it like her,” Henton said of her mother’s oxtails. “I’m close, but Mom would do a special something-something.”