Leah Chase

Leah Lange Chase — the Queen of Creole Cuisine — transformed Dooky Chase's Restaurant in New Orleans into both a culinary institution and a civil rights landmark. During the 1950s and '60s, when segregation laws made it illegal for Black and white people to eat together, Dooky Chase's became the meeting place where civil rights leaders — including Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall, and the Freedom Riders — planned strategy over Chase's cooking. She fed the movement.

Born in Madisonville, Louisiana, on January 6, 1923, Chase was one of eleven children. She moved to New Orleans and married Edgar "Dooky" Chase Jr. in 1946, taking over the kitchen of his family's sandwich shop and transforming it into one of the finest restaurants in the South. Her Creole cuisine — gumbo, fried chicken, stuffed shrimp, and her famous gumbo z'herbes — drew diners from around the world.

Chase cooked at Dooky Chase's for over 70 years. She was the inspiration for Tiana, the first Black Disney princess in The Princess and the Frog (2009). She won the James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award, was honored by the National Endowment for the Arts, and received the Légion d'honneur from France. She worked in the kitchen until she was 96. She joined the ancestors on June 1, 2019, and is remembered as one of the most important figures in American culinary history — someone who used food as a tool for justice.