STAR-BULLETIN / 2000 Helen Chock was still taking, and cooking, food orders in her Helena's Hawaiian Food restaurant well into her 80s. The owner of the noted Kalihi eatery died Friday just shy of age 90. CLICK FOR LARGE

Helena's founder as beloved as her food

Helen Chock / 1917-2007

STORY SUMMARY »

Faithful customers of Helena's Hawaiian Foods in Kalihi may have noticed that the restaurant is closed this week. It was a planned shutdown of a few days for maintenance and other business matters.

The James Beard Award-winning restaurant will remain closed now until July 21.

Chock's daughter, Helen Katsuyoshi, said Chock was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer three weeks ago. She said she wouldn't put it past her mother to have planned her passing for a time when the restaurant would be closed anyway. "My mother was very pragmatic."

FULL STORY »

When Helen Chock died on Friday, her family briefly considered closing its Kalihi restaurant, Helena's Hawaiian Foods. Briefly.

But there were orders to fill, Chock's daughter, Elaine Katsuyoshi, said. "If we closed, she would turn over in her grave."

Chock died of pancreatic cancer, less than a month shy of her 90th birthday.

For more than 60 years she had worked tirelessly at Helena's, the restaurant she opened on North King street in 1946. Chock chopped, sliced, grilled, stewed and fried her beloved plates of traditional foods, becoming especially known for her pipikaula-style short ribs and butterfish collars.

Katsuyoshi said her mother was working 12 hours a day until recently, when she asked Katsuyoshi to spell her for a few hours in the afternoon, "so she could take naps between the lunch and dinner hour."

She finally had to give it up on May 18, too tired to keep up the pace. On June 8 came the diagnosis of cancer, Katsuyoshi said.

In a Star-Bulletin interview in 1996, Chock said she was doing what she felt she was meant to do. "I don't feel stress. For 50 years I been doing this, and if you love your work, why you going be stressed out? It's about what you love. This is what I wanted."

The original Helena's was a casual place of Formica tabletops and wooden stools, but became a favorite of local celebrities and was well-regarded in the national restaurant guide Zagat's. It was Chock's husband, Jong Chock, who said she should call the restaurant Helena's -- because it sounded more Hawaiian than "Helen."

In 2001, the restaurant moved to School Street and Chock's grandson, Craig Katsuyoshi, took over the kitchen, although Chock stayed on as cashier.

Just a year earlier, Chock had made a rare trip out of state, to New York, where she collected one of the megaprizes in the restaurant world, a James Beard Foundation Award. Helena's was named a Regional Classic, a special designation for locally owned, neighborhood eateries that best reflect the character of their communities.

Although she said she made a lot of new friends at the awards ceremony -- and invited them all to visit Helena's -- Chock was unimpressed with the city and was eager to get back home and fill her Mother's Day orders.

After her mother's cancer was found, Katsuyoshi said, the family decided against surgery, although Chock underwent radiation treatment just to contain the cancer and prevent pain.

"She said she didn't want to go to any nursing home, she didn't want to have pain, she just wanted to not wake up one day."

And that's how it happened, Katsuyoshi said. "She was not afraid at all and from that I take comfort."

Services are tentatively scheduled for July 21, but details are pending.

Helena's is closed now, by the way, until July 17. But since they did fill all of Chock's pending orders, Katsuyoshi said, "I'm sure she's resting in peace."