Matthew Raiford, 45, a sixth-generation farmer in coastal Georgia who has been a chef for 20 years, said his father, a baker, had tried to dissuade him from going into the restaurant business because of the open racism in Southern kitchens. “He didn’t see a future for me in this field,” Mr. Raiford said. Like many other African-American chefs, Mr. Raiford found his way to running his own kitchen by taking corporate and hotel jobs, where diversity is encouraged and human-resources departments are careful.

But even where there is no overt sign of racism, African-American cooks often feel they are being held back. “There is a glass ceiling for black chefs, an assumption that you will not get to own your own restaurant,” Ms. Nelson said. “As a black woman, and a pastry chef, it’s clear to everyone I’m not threatening and also that I’m never going to be the executive chef.”

Still, some black chefs see Ms. Deen’s success as an inspiration.

“My heart goes out to her,” said Charlotte Jenkins, 70, a chef in Mount Pleasant, S.C., who said Ms. Deen’s accomplishment in building a business from scratch was something all Southern women could respect. “Even though her take on Southern cooking is different from mine.” Ms. Jenkins’s restaurant, Gullah Cuisine, emphasizes the coastal cooking of the Carolina Lowcountry. (The area embraced by the term “Southern cooking” is as large as France and Italy combined.)

Others gave Ms. Deen credit for showing some of the diversity and deliciousness of Southern food to Americans outside the region, where clichés of collard greens and fried chicken were often believed to make up an entire cuisine.

Still others said the rowdy, raunchy work environment described in the lawsuit against Ms. Deen and her brother by a former employee of their Uncle Bubba’s Oyster House in Savannah, Ga., was endemic in restaurant kitchens.

“I’ve seen porn and racist jokes, foul language — it’s pretty extreme and it happens more than most people know,” Kevin Sbraga, 34, an African-American chef in Philadelphia, said of the many restaurant kitchens he has worked in, in the North and in the South. He said that when he worked in the South a decade ago, the line cooks he worked with respected Ms. Deen. “Everyone, white and black, was proud at that time of how she was representing for the South. I guess some people overstay their welcome.”