Helse Restaurant

On a Norwegian fishing town’s historic alley named for a Chinese merchant murdered in 1932, Helse Restaurant serves pancakes for breakfast, turkey sandwiches for lunch, and sweet and sour chicken for dinner. The name means ‘health’ in Norwegian, fitting for Petersburg, Alaska’s ‘Little Norway,’ where the high school teams are the Vikings and Valkyries, and locals vacation in Scandinavia visiting relatives. Since 1995, this cafe-meets-whole-food-store has embodied the alley’s layered past: built over water on century-old pilings where Japanese laundries once operated alongside Sing Lee’s general store.

Sing Lee himself was never solved as a murder, which locals will still bring up unprompted if given the chance. His alley now hosts a restaurant that serves biscuits and gravy in the morning and won ton soup by dinner, without anyone finding this particularly strange. That’s Petersburg’s whole arrangement in miniature: a Norwegian fishing town with a Chinese-named street, Japanese laundry history under its floorboards, and a wellness cafe named for a language most of its regulars no longer speak fluently, all of it still standing on pilings someone drove into the mud over a century ago.