“In the black community, they will not come to New Orleans unless they come to Dooky Chase’s.” “That’s it.” For more than half a century, Leah Chase kept the Creole cooking tradition alive at her restaurant Dooky Chase in New Orleans’s Treme district. She was a pioneering chef and businesswoman, and her restaurant became a magnet for African-American artists, politicians, musicians and civil rights leaders. “When I came in, it was in the ’40s. African-Americans at that time were working more into — to better jobs. We had attorneys then. We had doctors. You could see change coming. And coming fast. In the 1950s and ’60s, Dooky Chase became the gathering spot for civil rights workers. It was one of the few places in the city where blacks and whites could come together. “We had a dining room upstairs that, boy, if that room could talk it would tell you plenty about a lot of things. A lot of political meetings. Because you’ve got to understand, there was no place that the whites could meet the blacks unless they went into church. But they would come here.” “Because it was illegal, right?” “Yeah...” [Crosstalk] “So they would come mingle here illegally? But you got away with it.” “I don’t know how I got away with it. How Dooky got away with it. See, this was a popular space, and for my father-in-law and mother-in-law had a lot of respect from the community. My husband had a lot of respect from the community. They did a lot of community work. So, for some uncanny reason, they didn’t bother them at all. There are gumbos and gumbos and all kinds of gumbos. The gumbo we make here is a traditional Creole gumbo. You come to this neck of the woods in the Treme area, particularly where the Creoles of color started and lived, you get a whole ’nother view of what Creole is. We fed them all: Thurgood Marshall, King Cole, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Lena Horne, Sarah Vaughan. She was a sweetheart. Everybody, everybody. Because there were no other places for people to go. So they had to come here. But I was pretty grateful that after they did have integration the people still remembered. Here we are on this corner.” “Just recently, you hosted George Bush here. Tell me about that.” “Of course, to me it wasn’t as royal as I would have liked to treat him because they brought him through my back door. I said ‘Mr. President, I don’t like my guests coming through my back door.’ We’ve had all of them.” “Your restaurant was probably the place to see some of the best collection of art by African-American artists in the city for a while.” “When I first got it here, they had no art galleries handling African-American artists. So when my friends like John Biggers, Jake Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, they say we’re going to put some work on your wall. So I got a lot of it as gifts from the big boys. Art has to be something to me that talks to you that you can feel that person who made this art, and I thought that was a stepping stone for the community too.” In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. When The Times spoke with Leah Chase two years later, she was 84 years old, still living in a FEMA trailer across the street from her restaurant. “Water is strange, it just runs its own course. And we’ve, we had water. We had never had water in this building before, but we had water on the street. But it would go, it would come and rise up to maybe hubcaps of cars, but then go down. This water kept coming. And it stayed, you know. So that made it terrible. We had five feet of water down there on that bar.” “How do you get the courage and the strength to go through —” “You know, you just —” “You were living in a FEMA trailer next door for months and months. How do you get through something like that?” “You know, you just go from day to day. You don’t stop to mourn. If you stop to whine and cry about it, you know, because let me tell you, honey, I’m a believer. I’m a strong believer in God. That wasn’t man’s doing at all. You saw man’s mistakes. And maybe that’s why God did it, to show man his big mistakes that he made, and he made many of them. When you saw those people floating around in water, you saw every mistake you made.” Dooky Chase finally reopened two years after the hurricane. Floodwaters had destroyed much of the place. But it didn’t reach the restaurant’s famous African-American artwork. “I pray a lot. I came up with three rules, Kim. First you pray, then you work, then do for others. That’s it. You know, I tell people all the time, I don’t know if I’m such a great Christian or not, as much as I pray, because I’m so afraid to die, and that — that frightens me. And one priest told me, ‘I don’t know what you’re afraid of.’ He said, ‘Don’t you know you’re doing everything that Jesus liked?’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I am? And what does Jesus like?’ He said, ‘Jesus loved to eat.’”