Daughter-in-law BOY MEETS GIRL. Girl meets boy's mom. Girl enters mom's kitchen -- and never leaves. Boy still can't cook. This classic tale of romance is brought to you by Debbie and John Leong, proprietors of Leong's Hawaiian Cafe.
keeps kitchen
traditions alive
The family guards its
pipikaula secret recipeA FOOD LOVE AFFAIR
Betty Shimabukuro / bshimabukuro@starbulletin.com
Or rather, she's the proprietor; he's the helpmate.
Imagine Debbie Leong, recent high school graduate, dreaming of a simple future as wife and mother: "My goal was, find a man who can take care of me and support me, so I can stay home and take care of my family."
But then came John, her brother's best friend. They started dating in the late '60s. He took her to his mother's restaurant, already a going concern of nearly 20 years.
Matriarch Lucy Leong had no daughters to work with her in the kitchen -- until she met Debbie.
Lucy's two sons had helped out a bit -- "I used to just make pocket change. That's how I got my first surfboard," John says -- but restaurant work was not in their bones.
Debbie, however, started waitressing, moved into the kitchen to wash dishes, "and after that she started teaching me how to cook." She married John in 1971, tried some outside work but came back to Leong's. Eventually, she was running the place.But first the young woman of Chinese-Puerto Rican descent had to learn to cook Hawaiian food. At the time, her skills were limited to Spam and eggs.
"Lot of scolding," she recalls of learning from Honey -- her name for her mother-in-law. "She would say, 'Doesn't taste right,' and, 'How come you did it this way?' and I'd say, 'You weren't here, so I had to do it myself.'"
There were no written recipes in the Leong kitchen; still aren't. "I used to say, 'Honey, you have to write everything down for me,' and she said, 'No. I'm just going to show you, teach you, and you're going to learn from there.'"
To this day, only family and close friends work at the restaurant. That way, John says, the recipes can be kept secret.
Lucy Leong and her father, Henry "Christmas" Young, opened their restaurant in 1950 at 211-A Mokauea St. -- John still has that address memorized -- in the area known as lower Kalihi. "She used to cater to the stevedores," John says.
Young was the cook and taught his daughter. John's aunts, Frances and Millie, also helped out, as well as Auntie Myrna, who is actually a close family friend and still works at the restaurant.
Their specialties were -- and are -- pipikaula, luau stew and chop steak. Lucy prepared them her father's way, and Debbie prepares them her mother-in-law's way."Lots of customers tell me it still tastes the same," she says. "Thank God for that."
In 1966, Leong's moved to the top of North King Street, a stone's throw from the freeway. There it remains, the constant roar of traffic part of its ambience.
History repeats itself at Leong's. John remembers that his father, John Sr., worked days for the city maintaining streetlights. After work he'd come to the restaurant to help out. John Jr. is a diver for the Navy at Pearl Harbor. After work he comes to the restaurant to do what Debbie calls "small-kine stuff," such as chopping onions.
The Leongs have a son, John III, 28, and a daughter, Tanya, 23. And John III has a girlfriend who is already helping out at the restaurant. John Jr. is hoping the children will take over, eventually.
He and Debbie actually had no plans to make Leong's their permanent occupation, until his mother died in 1997. "People kept asking, are we going to continue the restaurant? The words just came out of my mouth -- 'Deb, we're going to run the restaurant.'"
"I said, 'John, you don't know how to cook.' He said, 'Yeah, but you do.'"
Debbie says John was actually thinking of his mother's customers, many of them loyal since the '50s.
John remembers how his mom would feed her regulars even if they were short on cash, how she'd offer homeless people meals as well. "Ninety-nine percent of the time, people came back to pay back the money."
Adds Debbie, "She truly believed if you do something good for somebody, the Lord will bless you even more."
She adored Honey, Debbie says, despite the scoldings in the kitchen. "We were very best of friends. Everybody thought we were mother and daughter." She turns to her husband, laughs: "They never knew about HIM."