Leah Chase

“If you’re in a hurry, just eat your sandwich and go. Don’t even start cooking, because you can’t do anything well in a hurry. I love food. I love serving people. I love satisfying people.” — Leah Chase

The undisputed “Queen of Creole Cuisine,” Leah Chase was a restaurateur and world-renowned chef who championed civil rights. After working as a server in “whites only” venues in New Orleans’s French Quarter, she married jazz musician Edgar “Dooky” Chase Jr. in 1946 and joined his family’s restaurant business in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Treme. Under her influence, Dooky Chase’s Restaurant evolved from a corner sandwich shop into a formal dining establishment, where African Americans could experience the superb regional cuisine and attentive service that the city’s upscale white restaurants had refused to offer them.
Defying segregation laws, Leah Chase seated both Black and white customers at Dooky Chase’s Restaurant, making it one of the few places in Jim Crow-era New Orleans where civil rights activists of all races could gather publicly to strategize. “In my dining room, we changed the course of America over a bowl of gumbo and some fried chicken,” Chase recalled.