Leah Chase & Dooky Chase

Leah Chase (1923–2019) — the Queen of Creole Cuisine — ran Dooky Chase Restaurant on Orleans Avenue in Tremé for over 60 years. The restaurant served as the unofficial meeting place of the Civil Rights movement in New Orleans: the dining room where Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall, James Baldwin, Ray Charles, Duke Ellington, and the Freedom Riders ate, strategised, and gathered. In segregation-era New Orleans, Dooky Chase was one of the few restaurants where Black people could sit at a white-tablecloth table. Leah Chase fed the movement — literally — and the food she served was Creole cooking at its highest standard, prepared with the authority of a chef who had been cooking since she was a teenager and who never stopped.

Leah Chase's culinary significance: she was the keeper of the Creole tradition in the second half of the 20th century, the standard-bearer who maintained the techniques while New Orleans food culture shifted around her. Her gumbo z'herbes (see LA1-02) — the green gumbo with an odd number of greens served every Holy Thursday — became the dish most associated with her name and with Dooky Chase. Her fried chicken (which she insisted had to be seasoned, battered, and fried to a very specific standard) rivalled Austin Leslie's as the best in the city. Her shrimp Clemenceau, her stuffed peppers, her bread pudding — each was a technique document executed at the same standard for decades.

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