Chef Spotlight: Leah Chase
The Queen of Creole Cuisine ran a dining room where the civil rights movement was planned over gumbo.
Leah Chase took over Dooky Chase's Restaurant in New Orleans' Treme in the 1940s and turned a sandwich shop into a white-tablecloth Creole dining room at a time when Black-owned fine dining was nearly unthinkable.
The upstairs room became a meeting place. Freedom Riders, NAACP organizers, Thurgood Marshall and later Martin Luther King Jr. sat in a mixed-race dining room that was technically illegal under Louisiana law. Chase served them anyway. Her position was simple: people who are fed can think.
Her gumbo z'herbes, made with nine greens and served on Holy Thursday, drew lines around the block. She also filled the dining room with Black art at a time when no gallery in the city would show it.
Hurricane Katrina put five feet of water in the building. She was 82. She reopened it.
She cooked until she was 96.