Elena’s Restaurant legacy is amazing adobo omelet

Elena’s Restaurant, advertised as “the home of the finest Filipino foods,” started out 44 years ago with only six stools at a counter in a small snack shop in Waipahu.

Elena Butuyan would cook meals in her kitchen at home and serve them a mile away at the old Nabarette Store on Waipahu Street, the main sugar plantation road.

It was 1974, the year President Richard Nixon infamously resigned from office.

But it was an auspicious year for the Butuyan family because Elena had an epiphany about creating an omelet that appealed to Filipino tastes, featuring pork adobo.

It became her all-time most popular dish and “a staple in Hawaii,” said daughter Mellissa Cedillo. “We were the originators.”

In 1975 Elena and her husband, Theo Butuyan, moved their business to Westgate Shopping Center, where they took over the former ABC Bakery and Coffee Shop, with 15 seats at the counter.

Fondness for Elena’s cooking enabled them to expand to ever- larger spots, adding three more restaurants on Oahu and a fourth on Maui from the 1970s through the ’90s. At one time they also had four food trucks.

In 2005 their final move was to their current location at Tropicana Square in Waipahu, with an expansion last May to double their dining room.

Claim to fame: Inspiration for Elena’s No. 1 dish, the pork adobo and fried rice omelet, came in a dream. Cedillo said her mother surmised, “the Americans have omelets, how come Filipinos can’t have one? She dreamt of it, then made it, and said: ‘We have a Filipino omelet now!’ And it was really popular. We sell at least 100 from the food truck and more than 100 at the restaurant every day.”

The egg is fried into a thin, crepelike covering that is wrapped around the rice and pork to keep it moist and steaming. It looks like a massive burrito that you couldn’t possibly finish, but it’s so satisfying, it’s hard to stop eating.

Son Richard Butuyan said his father trademarked the dish in the 1990s because “everyone was copying us,” and while that’s fine, they wanted credit for inventing it.

The Lechon Special is the second top seller: crispy pork belly chopped up and tossed together with Hawaiian salt and chopped tomatoes, laced with white and green onions.

Another favorite since 1974 is Theo Butuyan’s sari sari, a soup of long eggplant, squash, ong choi, tomatoes and onions, simmered with baby shrimp and crispy pork belly.

Elena’s has won several local culinary awards, and in 2016 appeared on chef Robert Irvine’s Food Network television special, “A Hero’s Welcome.”

What’s new: The newest creation is the Lechon Special Fried Rice Omelette, also trademarked. An alternate version is the Triple D, dedicated to Food Network star Guy Fieri, who filmed a “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” episode at Elena’s in 2014 and put the restaurant on the global radar. It’s a combination of crispy pork belly and fried rice made without the egg, because “Guy Fieri doesn’t like eggs,” Cedillo said.

Being on the show “was the best thing that ever happened to us,” she said. “We had the Guy Fieri effect, the craziness, and it hasn’t stopped!” Fan mail arrives all the time, as the episode is often repeated.

The restaurant is full of tourists during the summer. “They want to take our pictures,” Cedillo said “We’re shy people, (but) we cannot go hide in the back.”

The family: The Butuyans immigrated with their two daughters from Dagupan City in the Philippines in 1969, settling in Waipahu.

Once their first restaurant was established, the couple quickly expanded. They turned an old Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop in Waipahu Shopping Plaza into a restaurant, then opened shops in Kalihi, Wahiawa, Pearlridge and Kahului, Maui, all closed now. Elena’s current sole location is on Moloalo Street, parallel to Farrington Highway.

Elena’s lunch wagons predated the ongoing nationwide food-truck revolution by decades. They were her parents’ way of boosting business by delivering food to workers whenever the restaurant was slow, Cedillo said.

Four trucks once served mostly construction workers at Campbell Industrial Park, Ko Olina Lagoon, Mililani Mauka, Ewa and Waipio.

Richard Butuyan said Elena’s still has one 30-year-old orange truck that goes to the Campbell site Mondays. A new, decorated truck debuted in 2013, serving Mililani Tech Park and two locations downtown.

The Butuyan’s three children all helped in the restaurants while growing up, though eldest daughter Mary Cris Acosta is no longer involved.

Cedillo retired as a Realtor while still in her 40s to take over in 2006, modernizing the business end and establishing a presence on social media. Son Richard has been there since 1991, when he was 22.

When the elder Butuyans “retired” to Las Vegas about several years ago, they ran a satellite Elena’s to keep themselves busy, but closed it in 2013 after five years.

Most of the current restaurant’s employees have been with Elena’s for over 20 years, and Butuyan credited them for keeping up the quality: “It’s our employees that make Elena’s great.”

Their longest-serving staffer is Yolanda Cadiz, who started in 1975 and has worked as a cook, waitress and manager at different times. “It’s like family already,” Cadiz said. “Our boss is generous, the hours are flexible.”

So far no one in the family’s third generation wants to continue the restaurant, except for Richard Butuyan’s youngest son, Eythan, who is 6 and wants to be a chef. “I’m glad (he’s interested), I hope he stays that way.”

If not, he said, “that’s it, we close, we won’t sell it. We want to keep it in the family.”

“Old Friends” catches up with longtime local food producers. It runs on the third week of each month. Email suggestions to crave@staradvertiser.com or call Pat Gee at 529-4749.