"My soul has been fed," said Edgar Poree III, mid-drumstick. He's been coming to Dooky Chase's Restaurant, just off of Orleans Avenue in New Orleans since 1945—and his table is overflowing with red beans and rice and crispy-on-the-outside, tender-on-the-inside fried chicken.
The President of the United States knows to wish Leah Chase, the spitfire 93-year-old chef of Dooky Chase's, a happy birthday. The restaurant has been a New Orleans institution for over 75 years, inspiring fierce loyalty and devotion among locals and out-of-towners who fall head-over-heels for Chase's Creole cooking. She commands the kitchen with iron-clad kitchen tools ("I don't know where I was when they were passing out patience. I must've been behind the door somewhere, because I don't have any") and turns out the type of life-affirming gumbo you dream of eating in a long-lost relative's home in New Orleans. See for yourself in the video below:
Chase says, "I'm the luckiest woman in the world." Even though she's there from 8 a.m. to midnight, daily (we are all slackers by comparison). But she's proud to have been cooking for the New Orleans community for so long, a community that eats when it meets. Eager diners have included Ray Charles, Oprah, Thurgood Marshall, and President Obama. As sous chef Cleo Robinson said, "If these walls could talk—I would love to hear what they have to say." The place is as filled to the brim with local and national history and memories as it is with Creole classics like shrimp clemenceau.
"Nobody in New Orleans said, 'I'm going to take you to a restaurant,' said Chase, thinking back on the years she's had at the restaurant. "They say, 'I'm going to take you to the restaurant.'" Because there is only one—and it's Dooky Chase's.