Leah Chase: The Queen of Creole Cuisine Who Fed the Civil Rights Movement

The Queen of Creole Cuisine

Leah Chase was a chef, an author, a television personality, and the undisputed Queen of Creole Cuisine — a title she held not because someone gave it to her but because she earned it over a career spanning more than seven decades behind the stove at Dooky Chase's Restaurant on Orleans Avenue in the Tremé. She was passionate about two things above all others: Creole cooking and African American art. Both of those passions made the world a better and more beautiful place.

Chase married into the Dooky Chase family and transformed their sandwich shop into one of the most important restaurants in American history. That is not an exaggeration. Dooky Chase's became a gathering place for civil rights movement participants in the 1960s, a restaurant where Black activists could meet, plan, and strategize over plates of fried chicken, gumbo, and stuffed shrimp. In a segregated city where Black people were excluded from most public spaces, Dooky Chase's was a sanctuary — a place where the movement was fed, literally and figuratively.

Feeding the Movement

The list of people who ate at Leah Chase's table reads like a who's who of the civil rights movement. Thurgood Marshall. Martin Luther King Jr. The Freedom Riders. The NAACP leaders who were planning the legal and social strategies that would transform America. They all came to Dooky Chase's, because the food was extraordinary and because Leah Chase made everyone who walked through her door feel welcome, important, and nourished in ways that went beyond the plate.

She was also a collector and champion of African American art, filling the walls of Dooky Chase's with works by Black artists at a time when the mainstream art world largely ignored them. The restaurant became an informal gallery, a place where art and food and community intersected in a space that was entirely Leah Chase's creation.

James Beard and Beyond

Chase received the James Beard Foundation's Who's Who of Food and Beverage in America award in 2010, a recognition that placed her among the most important figures in American culinary history. She wrote cookbooks, appeared on television, and became a beloved public figure whose warmth and wisdom made her as famous for her personality as for her cooking.

She was known for her directness. If a president sat at her table and reached for the hot sauce before tasting the food, she would tell him to put it down. If a customer asked for changes to a dish, she would explain, firmly and with love, that the dish was already perfect. She had earned the right to that confidence through decades of work, and nobody — not even a president — was going to tell Leah Chase how to season her gumbo.

Leah Chase died in 2019 at the age of ninety-six, and New Orleans lost its queen. But Dooky Chase's remains open, the art still hangs on the walls, and the gumbo is still made the way she made it. The Queen of Creole Cuisine is gone, but her kingdom endures.