Visitors heed the siren call of New Orleans for different reasons: music lovers to visit the birthplace of jazz; fans of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire to experience its ambience; party-lovers to partake of Mardi Gras. Foodies make New Orleans their port of call because of a restaurant presided over by the Queen of Creole cuisine, though, rather than a tiara, a pink baseball cap crowns her snowy locks.
The establishment that is equal parts museum, art gallery, and café is owned by a celebrity chef not schooled in Paris’s Cordon Bleu, but through the recipes that made up the meals of her childhood. Leah Lange, the eldest of eleven children—nine girls—was born in Madisonville, Louisiana, a small, segregated farming community nestled between the Tchefuncte River and Lake Pontchartrain. The sisters took turns with the cooking and subsisted on fish from the bayou, barnyard chickens, and pork from their pigs to complement garden vegetables. Her father, Charles, bore the burden of raising his large family on a Depression-era salary of fifty cents an hour. Leah later recalled of the lean years, “Father told us to pray for work every day. We’d go fishing in the mornings, so we could have perch and grits for breakfast—but a lot of times, man, it was just grits.” Her mother, Hortense, was innovative, and when her daughters needed clothes, she transformed printed flour sacks into dresses. She also instilled in her offspring the ability to dream. After a storm, she would take them outside to look at the rainbow, to illustrate that good followed bad.
Since Madisonville had no high school for black students, Leah Lange took the road less travelled and moved to New Orleans, where she boarded with her aunt and attended the all-girl, all-black, Catholic St. Mary’s Academy. When she graduated three years later, she accepted a job as a seamstress in a factory, but she felt making hundreds of pockets for pants was not her calling. Her next position was as a waitress in the Colonial, located in the French Quarter. This job was a radical move, as nice girls did not frequent the area, a red-light district. The experience led to her realization that her heart lay with food, both for her own enjoyment and for the joy of others. Leah was likewise smitten with the environment of white tablecloths and flatware, a novel experience, as the city did not have sit-down restaurants for African-Americans.
At a 1945 Mardi Gras ball, Leah caught the attention of Edgar “Dooky” Chase II, five years younger, a bandleader who coaxed the cadence of jazz from his trumpet. In 1946, the couple married in secret; although Edgar had the parental requirements of being Catholic and Creole, her parents considered musicians financially unstable. Leah hated the nomadic life of travelling with his band, and when the first of their four children arrived, she felt justified in being a stay-at-home mother. Around 1952, with Edgar’s father’s health declining, the son stepped in to run Dooky Chase, the family’s street corner stand, which sold lottery tickets and where black workers could cash their paychecks. Its locale was Tremé, one of the nation’s oldest African-American neighborhoods, and its menu consisted of po’ boy sandwiches, crusty loaves of bread stuffed with chaurice—spicy pork sausages—or fried oysters. When the children attended school full-time, Mrs. Chase wanted to bring fine dining to her community and worked alongside her husband. Over time, the stand evolved into Dooky Chase Restaurant. In an echo of the Colonial, Leah introduced fancy fare such as Lobster Thermidor and shrimp cocktail. However, when her customers thought shrimp cocktail was an alcoholic beverage, she switched to the familiar Creole cuisine. Her dishes belong to a deeply rooted New Orleans tradition that combines the products of the Louisiana countryside, the bayous, and the marshes with sophisticated cooking techniques from the kitchens of West Africa, France, and Spain. The revised menu proved to be a success, and the restaurant grew in stature until it became a local landmark and the destination for top black entertainers. The ninety-five-year-old Mrs. Chase remembers each performer’s preference: Nat King Cole, four-minute eggs; Lena Horne, fried chicken; Duke Ellington, gumbo; Cicely Tyson, crab meat. Ray Charles immortalized the eatery in popular lore when he recorded “Early in the Morning Blues” and improvised the lyric, “I went to Dooky Chase to get something to eat. The waitress looked at me and said, ‘Ray, you sure look beat.’”
Part of the charm of Dooky Chase is in its ties to the civil rights movement. Although Jim Crow laws had forbidden the races to mix in public, city officials had turned the other way in the case of this restaurant, fearful of the public outcry if they tried to intervene with the beloved eatery. The Chases provided a private room at the top of the stairs for clandestine meetings for black voter-registration campaign organizers, the NAACP, and campus sit-ins. Among those who gathered there were Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King, Sr., who Leah nicknamed Big Daddy King. Nothing could stop the couple from feeding the movement: not threatening letters, not a pipe bomb, not fear of arrest. When the Freedom Riders were behind bars, Mrs. Chase delivered take-out. Leah recalled, “I feel like in this restaurant we changed the course of the world over bowls of gumbo. That’s how we always did the planning—over gumbo.” In a foodie town, vittles heal wounds.
In New Orleans, a city that reveres its cafes as civic monuments the way New York City reveres the Statue of Liberty or San Francisco the Golden Gate Bridge, Dooky Chase is an emporium that serves nearly two hundred people at a time. Leah has an appreciation for forms of artistic expression other than food, and the restaurant’s violet and cream walls display canvases of mid- and late twentieth-century African-American art. Behind the buffet line, stained glass panels depict New Orleans street and market scenes. The reason for her patronage is to help others, and for selfish reasons as well. Leah explained, “I could be as mean as a sack of rattlesnakes if I didn’t have this art to soften me up.” Indeed, when people do not meet her exacting standards, she uses the expression “stupid jackass.’’ After years of collecting canvasses, Leah became the subject of one. A painting of Mrs. Chase wearing her trademark pink baseball cap, absorbed in slicing yellow squash, has been added to the collection of iconic American images in the National Portrait Gallery, part of the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, under the same roof as presidential portraits ranging from George Washington to Barack Obama. When the artist asked whether she thought the rendition accurate, the eighty-nine-year-old Leah responded, “You could have made me look like Halle Berry or Lena Horne, but you made it look like me.” Signs of Leah’s faith also decorate the walls. Above the kitchen doorway is an assortment of crucifixes that a regular customer brings back from his travels and presents as a tribute. A birthday blessing from Pope Benedict hangs nearby, alongside a framed photograph of Pope Francis, a gift from a nun.
Dooky Chase is a mecca for meals because of its spicy delicacies, and it remains a political meeting ground where the city’s leaders, black and white, settle problems over plates of steaming crawfish, paneed rabbit, or seafood jambalaya. President George H. W. Bush had quail and grits the last time he was there; another guest was presidential candidate Barack Obama, whom Leah chastised for putting hot sauce on her famed gumbo.
The wrath of nature came to call when Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, soaking the eatery with five feet of water and forcing Dooky and Leah to move into a FEMA trailer across the street from their restaurant. Looters capitalized on the calamity and raided all its liquor, the payroll, the cash registers—everything but the art collection. The rebuilding effort moved slowly, in part because Mr. Chase did not like to borrow money in much the same way as he hated to spend it. Mrs. Chase said of her spouse, “He wouldn’t give a crippled crab a crutch to get to a gumbo party.’’
Alas, one does not reach age ninety-five without experiencing pain, and Leah had her share of vicissitudes. In the early days of the restaurant, Mrs. Chase kept a three-gallon vat of boiling water steeped in tea on a shelf, and it was accidentally poured on her in a scalding cascade. Her doctor placed bandages all over her blister-covered body, making her resemble a mummy, yet she did not miss a day of work. Another burn occurred when she was cleaning her grill; she recalled, “But you keep going. You put a little powder on your face and you keep going.’’ A tragedy that would have tested someone with less faith was losing her daughter Emily, who died giving birth to her seventh child. The baby only survived for several months. Leah did not take time off to grieve; her staff and customers depended on her. In 2016, her husband of seventy-one years passed away. Although they had often had problem patches in their marriage, Dooky was the love of her life. What helps her keep going are three children, sixteen grandchildren, and twenty-six great-grandchildren.
Despite her being almost a century old, it is a given in New Orleans that one will always find Leah Chase in the kitchen of her restaurant, chopping vegetables or stewing chicken before lunch service, clad in a shocking pink chef’s uniform—she said she gave up white because, at her age, she needed more color in her life—or in the dining room, greeting everyone from cufflink-clad bankers to guidebook-toting tourists. Nearing the century mark, when most of her peers have contentedly gone “out to pasture”―or at least to sip sweetened tea in the shade of a magnolia tree—she shows no signs of becoming a “tin-tin” (Creole for a retired little old lady). As the grande dame of Creole cooking says, “Seven days a week, yes, indeed. And no, I don’t know myself where I get the energy, I get up in the morning, say a little prayer, ‘Lord, get me through this day,’ and then I get through it.’’ No waitress ever needed to tell her, “Leah, you sure look beat.’’ The reason for her refusal to step down is that she loves the way she spends her time, and, as she explained, “Everybody on this earth is obligated to do something to make it better. This is what I’m doing.”
Over the years, there has been an outpouring of Hails to the Chef, and one is Leah Chase: Listen, I Say Like This. The title is an allusion to the expression utilized by elderly Creoles when they wish to emphasize a point. Leah dedicated the book to her late daughter. Cicely Tyson gave Mrs. Chase a t-shirt with this slogan emblazoned on the front. The autobiography is replete with photographs of Chase and celebrity customers: Julia Child, Jesse Jackson, Dizzy Gillespie, Bryant Gumbel, Quincy Jones. The indefatigable Mrs. Chase became the first black recipient of the James Beard Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Leah also received the unlikely chef accolades of serving as the inspiration for Tiana in The Princess and the Frog, Disney’s first African-American princess, and starring in Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” video.
Because of Dooky Chase’s association with fighters for racial equality, tantalizing cuisine, and her iconic status as Queen of Creole, one can easily find oneself humming the old Southern lyric, “I wish I was in Dixie, hooray! Hooray!”