Leah Chase: The Queen Who Fed a Movement in New Orleans

There is a particular kind of New Orleans magic that happens when someone puts a plate of food in front of you and tells you to sit down and eat. No menu. No discussion. You just eat. Leah Chase perfected that move over the course of seven decades at Dooky Chase's Restaurant in Treme, and in doing so, she fed presidents, Freedom Riders, musicians, and an entire city's sense of itself.

From Madisonville to the Stove That Changed Everything

Leah Lange was born on January 6, 1923, in Madisonville, Louisiana, a small town across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans. She was one of 14 children raised in a strict Catholic household. At 14, she crossed the lake to attend St. Mary's Academy and never really looked back. Her first restaurant gig was waiting tables at the Colonial Restaurant in the French Quarter for a dollar a day. In 1946, she married Edgar "Dooky" Chase II, a jazz trumpeter whose parents ran a small stand in Treme that sold lottery tickets and po-boy sandwiches. Leah walked into that kitchen in the 1950s and started cooking her family's Creole recipes, and the whole trajectory of the place changed. She transformed it from a lunch counter into the only fine dining restaurant in New Orleans that served Black patrons.

The Table Where the Movement Sat Down

In a city carved up by Jim Crow, Dooky Chase's became one of the only places in New Orleans where people of different races could sit together and talk. That wasn't just socially bold. It was illegal. The NAACP held strategy meetings there. Freedom Riders ate there. Martin Luther King Jr. sat at her table. "We changed the course of America over a bowl of gumbo," she once said.

Art, Gumbo, and the Princess

Dooky Chase's was also a gallery. Leah collected African American art with the same passion she brought to her roux. She was the inspiration for Princess Tiana in Disney's 2009 film The Princess and the Frog. She won the James Beard Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016. She passed away on June 1, 2019, at 96.

How Dirty Coast Celebrates the Spirit of Leah Chase

Designs like Eat Lunch Talk About Dinner capture the city's obsession with food as a way of life. Our Periodic Table of New Orleans celebrates every element that makes this city unique. The Be A New Orleanian Wherever You Are ethos is what Leah Chase practiced every day.