It’s been a long road back for Ms. Helen’s, and Seattle’s most famous soul food restaurant still has a way to go.
Helen Coleman founded Ms. Helen’s Diner in 1970, and it soon became a neighborhood institution in the Central District and a hub of the city’s Black community. As recounted in a 2021 Seattle Post-Intelligencer feature, Coleman and her daughter Jesdarnel “Squirt” Henton, who was cooking alongside her mother, “started to burn out in the early ‘80s.” They declared bankruptcy in 1983, but reopened as Ms. Helen’s Soul Food four years later, where they served some of the era’s most famous Black celebrities, like Richard Pryor, Gary Payton,
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