The ninety-three-year-old New Orleans chef Leah Chase arrived at Dooky Chase, her historic Creole restaurant, at 7:30 A.M. on Holy Thursday. Lent was over for the city’s Catholics, but the day is nonetheless a solemn occasion, marked by foot-washing ceremonies and the Mass of the Lord’s Supper. In New Orleans, Holy Thursday is also synonymous with going to Dooky’s for gumbo z’herbes, a rare form of New Orleans’s ubiquitous dish.

An hour before the 11 A.M. service, the first of three sold-out turns on the restaurant’s busiest day of the year, Chase was holding a knife over a steaming pile of smoked ham hocks. In her tenth decade, she requires the aid of a walker or a cane. Her fingers no longer travel in a straight line from knuckle-to-nail, but her hands remain nimble, and she can still be found in Dooky’s kitchen most days. Next month, she’ll become the first African-American to receive the James Beard Foundation’s lifetime-achievement award. (The Times was marvelling at her fortitude back in 1990, when she was just sixty-seven.) She pulled meat from the bones and chopped. “See how tender they are?” she said, extending a morsel of rosy pork. A local television cameraman, who was capturing the kitchen’s progress, asked Chase’s grandson, Edgar “Dooky” Chase IV, to name his favorite dish. His grandmother answered for him: “Gumbo.”

Located in Treme, one of the nation’s oldest African-American neighborhoods, Dooky Chase was started by the parents of Chase’s husband and partner, Edgar “Dooky” Chase, Jr., in 1941, as a po-boy shop inside an old shotgun house. Leah Chase, the eldest of eleven children, was raised in rural Madisonville, Louisiana, where her mother would stew with plums the quail that pecked at the family garden. Madisonville had no high school that allowed African-Americans, so she went to high school in New Orleans, and worked in French Quarter restaurants after graduation. She took over the kitchen at Dooky’s after marrying Edgar, in 1946, and over the years began mastering recipes more common at the segregated restaurants where she and her customers could never dine—dishes like Shrimp Clemenceau, a shellfish staple served with peas and potatoes at Galatoire’s, the French-Creole haunt favored by New Orleans’s white establishment. Early on, Dooky diners were flummoxed by the butter sauces and accents aigu. Some regulars, Chase told Gourmet in 2000, thought shrimp cocktail was a beverage. But all that started to change after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “When integration came in, you saw how other people did things—turns out there’s nothing wrong with shrimp Newberg,” she said, referring to the creamy recipe from French-American cuisine’s back catalogue.

Civil-rights organizers met in a room upstairs. Sarah Vaughan was partial to the stuffed crabs. Ray Charles wove the restaurant into the lyrics for “Early in the Morning Blues.” Chase called Martin Luther King, Sr., “Big Daddy King.” Dooky Chase ultimately grew into two adjacent shotgun houses, creating more room for, among other things, Chase’s distinguished collection of mid- and late-twentieth century African-American art. The paintings and sculptures by artists like Jacob Lawrence and Elizabeth Catlett underscore Chase’s position, as the foremost living practitioner of New Orleans Creole cuisine, within a creative tradition that extends beyond the kitchen.

Mariam Ortique, the widow of Revius Ortique, Jr., the civil-rights lawyer who became the first African-American justice elected to the Louisiana Supreme Court, told me, “This was the only white-tablecloth restaurant for black people. My husband would not spend a penny in any restaurant but here. When he invited someone out for dinner, you didn’t have to ask where, just what time. You knew it would be Dooky’s.” The restaurant and its matriarch built a national reputation as well. When Barack Obama visited, in 2008, Chase scolded him for putting hot sauce on his gumbo.

Made with a brown roux and plenty of the spicy sausage chaurice, that dish is served at Dooky’s year-round. But gumbo z’herbes, which is as much a busy refinement on smothered greens as an iteration of the famous soup/stew, is served only on Holy Thursday. Chase’s version, viscous and verdant, is thick with sausage and ham. (Its green color has led some people to label it “New Orleans vegetarian,” although Chase has started offering a “meatless” version, too—flavored with chicken fat.) The only other savory dish on the day’s special menu is fried chicken, prepared by Chase’s niece Cleo Robinson. Just about everyone orders both the gumbo and the chicken, followed by peach cobbler. And just about everyone has gone to great lengths to get a reservation. Faith Dawson, Chase’s niece and goddaughter, told me that she was only able to get a table for her family this year after the president of Tulane University cancelled.

As he awaited his gumbo and chicken at Dooky’s this year, the Cajun chef and businessman John Folse recalled Chase’s only Holy Thursday meal to take place somewhere other than Dooky’s. It was 2006, and the restaurant was closed for service, having been flooded by Hurricane Katrina’s levee breaches. (The flood also killed the tree, planted by Chase’s father, that provided the sassafras for Chase’s gumbo’s filé, and forced the chef to move into a FEMA trailer near the restaurant.) Folse persuaded Chase to allow him to prepare the meal for her. It was served ceremonially, as a tribute to Chase, at another nearby restaurant. Chase at the time had doubts that her restaurant would ever reopen. “I sat her down one day when she said, ‘I just can’t do it,’ ” Folse told me. “I said, ‘New Orleans cannot go on without Leah Chase.’ I said, ‘You will serve gumbo z’herbes at your restaurant on Holy Thursday again.’

Folse’s story was interrupted by a round of applause. Chase, wearing a pink apron, had entered the dining room, as she always does, at least once, on Holy Thursday. She lifted a hand from her walker to hold a microphone and proceeded to rib Folse for taking too much credit for her gumbo. (Folse has helped grind the gumbo greens in recent years, but, Chase told me, “I_ cook _it.”) She mentioned her daughter, Stella Reese, who runs Dooky’s dining room and began the day blessing the staff with Holy Water—a good thing, Chase said, “because sometimes my mouth gets ugly.” She added, “I’m still going at ninety-three. And I’ll still be going at ninety-five.”