On December 9, 2017, New Orleans Chapter members enjoyed a wonderful afternoon with Alumna Link Leah Chase at the renowned Dooky Chase restaurant in New Orleans.
In 2010, Leah Chase, New Orleans’ own “Queen of Creole Cuisine”, was inducted into the James Beard Foundation’s Who’s Who of Food & Beverage in America. Mrs. Chase was also named the recipient of the 2016 Lifetime Achievement award from the James Beard Foundation. The prestigious culinary foundation noted that Chase, at her iconic restaurant Dooky Chase, “pioneered Creole cooking in the United States and made dishes like jambalaya, gumbo, and fried chicken into kitchen staples.”
Further, Mrs. Chase has been praised for contributions to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, when she opened her restaurant to organizers and civil rights leaders, acting as a safe-haven where blacks and whites could come together while the rest of the city’s restaurants remained deeply segregated. For that work, she was named 2015 “New Orleanian of the Year” by Gambit magazine.
Chase and her husband, Edgar “Dooky” Chase Jr., took over his parent’s restaurant in the late 1940s, transforming the building on Orleans Avenue from a sandwich shop that sold lottery tickets to the dining destination it is today, revered for it’s color displays of African-American art and classic Creole cooking.
