W.

It has been a few months since I’ve posted. I’ve been teaching for the summer in California. I’m going back home to Philadelphia in a week and I’m moving to Atlanta in two weeks.

Queen of Creole Cuisine, advocate for African American art, inspired an actual Disney Princess . 

“Dooky Chase’s Restaurant was the first art gallery for black artists in New Orleans”

The restaurant that she and her husband’s family owns was a gathering place for people to discuss civil rights. (source linked to quote above) 

Leah Chase turned 95 this year. This image is circa 2011.

btw….Leah Chase is a Capricorn (b. January 6)

Leah Chase believes in the Kitchen Table and the food as healing and art and black life/lives:

“After graduating high school, Chase secured a job at the Colonial Restaurant on Chartres Street in New Orleans, then later transferred those skills to Dooky Chase - her husband Edgar “Dooky” Chase II’s family’s restaurant, which had been serving the Treme neighborhood since 1941. As she explained to the assembled guests at the Secret Supper, New Orleans was still segregated and she wanted to give the African American community somewhere special to dine.

At the time, elegant, sit-down restaurants were open only to a white clientele. Chase sought to change that, teaching formal service and elevated Creole cooking to staff in front and back of the house, eventually decorating the walls of the restaurant with pieces from her own estimable collection of drawings and paintings by African American artists.”

On those Freedom Rides

“According to Carol Allen’s  "Leah Chase: Listen, I Say Like This,“ one day in 1961, members of the all-white New Orleans police department surrounded the front door of Dooky Chase, demanding to know what was taking place inside. Dooky pulled himself up to his full 5'8” height and declared, “This is a restaurant. We’re just feeding our clients.“”

Read more: http://eatocracy.cnn.com/2013/01/21/a-toast-to-a-civil-rights-legend-leah-chase/

She has a portrait hanging at the National Portrait Gallery:

The National Gallery portrait of chef Leah Chase, ‘€˜Cutting Squash,‘€™ by Gustave Blache III.

Last but not least….

When the Zulu parade rolls, one of its key stops is the Dooky Chase restaurant, to allow Zulu royalty pay homage.