Kim Severson

<h1>Leah Chase, the nation’s pre-eminent Creole chef, always knew what to feed her famous customers.</h1>

The Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. liked barbecued ribs, and James Baldwin preferred gumbo. Singer Sarah Vaughan ordered stuffed crab to go, and Nat King Cole always wanted a four-minute egg.

She once had to stop President Barack Obama from putting hot sauce in her gumbo — a real culinary sin — and, despite pressure from a city still angry over the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, she fed President George W. Bush crab soup and shrimp Clemenceau on the second anniversary of the storm that nearly closed her restaurant, Dooky Chase’s, for good.

“In my dining room, we changed the course of America over a bowl of gumbo and some fried chicken,” she would often say.

Chase died Saturday at her son’s home near her restaurant in New Orleans, her daughter Stella Reese Chase said. She was 96.

Chase was much more than a gifted chef, although she would argue that there is no greater calling than feeding people. She spread her message through cookbooks, countless media interviews and television shows. Princess Tiana, the frog who wanted to own a restaurant in the animated Disney feature “The Princess and the Frog,” was based on Chase. It was the first African-American princess in a Disney movie.

Chase possessed a mix of intellectual curiosity, deep religious conviction and a will always to lift others up, which would make her a central cultural figure in both the politics of New Orleans and the national struggle for civil rights. “She is of a generation of African-American women who set their faces against the wind without looking back,” said Jessica Harris, an author and expert on food of the African diaspora and who Chase came to view as another daughter. “It’s a work ethic, yes, but it’s also seeing how you want things to be and then being relentless about getting there.”

Leah Lange was born in Madisonville., Louisiana, a small town on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, on Jan. 6, 1923. She was the second oldest of 13 children of Charles Lange, a ship’s caulker, and Hortensia (Raymond) Lange, a homemaker and seamstress. Her parents valued hard work and education, admonishing the children to keep their elbows off the table and teaching them to read with books that her father had salvaged from the trash heap at a nearby school for white children.

Because her hometown had no schools for African-Americans past sixth grade, she was sent to live with an aunt in New Orleans to complete her education at a Roman Catholic high school.

Chase was, by all accounts, exceptionally smart, and by an early age had memorized the Latin Mass. She graduated from high school at 16 and two years later took a job at a French Quarter restaurant.

It was the first restaurant she had ever been in, and it sparked a love of food beyond home cooking and an appreciation of beauty that she would nurture for the rest of her life.

She met Edgar Chase Jr., a jazz trumpeter and band leader known as Dooky, in 1945. Three months later they were married and began a family. They would have four children. Edgar Chase died in 2016 at 88.

In the early years of their marriage his parents ran a sandwich shop and lottery business in New Orleans in the Treme, one of America’s oldest African-American neighborhoods. Once the couple’s children were old enough, Chase began working with her husband at the restaurant. She slowly pushed her husband and his parents to expand the business, to make it more like the finer restaurants she had worked at in the French Quarter.

In a city operating under the heavy cloud of Jim Crow laws, Dooky Chase’s became the only upscale restaurant where African Americans could gather.

“In these desegregated times it’s hard to imagine what it meant for Leah Chase to try to create a fancy restaurant for black people,” said Lolis Eric Elie, an author and filmmaker whose father was a prominent New Orleans civil rights lawyer and whose mother was a well-regarded educator.

“Even in the days when my parents were courting, black people had Little League championship teams, college graduations and date nights with special people,” Elie said. “Dooky Chase’s was the place you went to for those occasions at the time when Galatoire’s and Antoine’s didn’t serve ‘colored.’”

The restaurant became a gathering place for leaders of the civil rights movement to discuss strategy, often with their white allies. At the time, it was illegal for black and white people to mix.

At the restaurant, Chase fed hungry Freedom Riders fresh off the road and hosted meetings of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She let a young Thurgood Marshall use her telephone to call Robert F. Kennedy even when phoned-in lunch orders were pouring in.

“We were trying to be accepted without hurting anybody,” Chase said in an interview with the National Public Radio program “The Splendid Table.” “In the ′60s, here come these young people — bam! — they would just go in there and break the door down. They were going to take chances, go to jail if they had to. We couldn’t understand that, but it worked. A lot of mistakes were made, but sometimes that’s what it takes to change a system.”

The era’s great musicians and actors, too, came through her door. The restaurant had such a hold on the cultural firmament of the time that Ray Charles rewrote the lyrics to “Early in the Morning Blues” in tribute to the restaurant: “I went to Dooky Chase to get me something to eat./The waitress looked at me and said, ‘Ray, you sure look beat.’”

Chase was as compassionate as she was strict, always adhering to a code shaped in large part by her Catholic beliefs. She held up Gen. George S. Patton of World War II fame as a hero and was a fan of baseball, which she often used as a metaphor.

“I just think that God pitches us a low, slow curve, but he doesn’t want us to strike out,” she said in a New York Times interview. “I think everything he throws at you is testing your strength, and you don’t cry about it, and you go on.”

She supported Tipper Gore’s campaign in the 1980s and ′90s against explicit and violent rock and rap lyrics and demanded that young people dress properly when they came to her restaurant, yet she didn’t leave the neighborhood when it fell on economic hard times in the 1980s, and an 896-unit public housing project opened up across the street. People urged her to move out. Instead, she renovated.

“If we would have moved off this corner, this whole community would have been gone a long time ago,” she told Carol Allen, a biographer. “Running away from it isn’t going to help anything or anybody. I say like this, If you can’t take a risk, you’re wasting God’s good time on earth.”

Chase believed in corporal punishment, opposed abortion and believed women should dress modestly. But she was always a champion of women, especially young women coming up in the kitchens of America’s restaurants. Her frequent advice to them was, “You have to look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man and work like a dog.”

Chase won numerous awards for her civil rights work and her cooking, but she was perhaps proudest of the work she did to promote art, Harris said.

Chase was 54 when she first walked into an art museum.

“Museums were segregated, and you didn’t go there, so we knew nothing,” she said. Her guide was Celestine Cook, a New Orleans socialite and civic leader who was the first African-American to sit on the board of the New Orleans Museum of Art, which Chase would join in 1972.

Her husband gave her a painting by the late African-American artist Jacob Lawrence, and her love of collecting was set. The walls of her restaurant were soon filled with pieces by artists like Elizabeth Catlett and John T. Biggers. It was considered by many to be Louisiana’s best collection of African-American art.

A portrait of Chase chopping squash in her kitchen by Gustave Blache III is in the National Portrait Gallery, and her chef’s jacket and other artifacts from her kitchen are on display in the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.

She often said she would “be as mean as a rattlesnake” without art.

“Art softens people up and warms them up to deal with each other in humane ways,” Chase told a congressional committee in 1995 in an effort to save funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 2005, when New Orleans’ levees broke during Hurricane Katrina, floodwater filled the floor of the restaurant but didn’t touch the art, which a grandson was able to retrieve undamaged.

For nearly 18 months, Chase and her husband lived in a government trailer next to the restaurant while they struggled to repair it. By 2007, it was open again.

The flood was only one of many setbacks Chase countered by cooking. Her eldest daughter, Emily — her right hand at the restaurant — died giving birth to her eighth child in 1990. That child died a short time later. The day after her daughter died, Chase was scheduled to open the restaurant at 11 a.m. So she did.

“I lost myself in the pots,” she wrote in “The Dooky Chase Cookbook.” “I had more tears in the gumbo pot than I had gumbo.”

In addition to her daughter Stella, survivors include a son, Edgar III; another daughter, Leah Chase Kamata; 16 grandchildren and 28 great-grandchildren.

Friends knew Chase’s health was failing in April, when she did not show up for her annual Holy Thursday lunch, for which she had long served gumbo z’herbes, a special dish that requires nine kinds of greens. Seats for the lunch were always booked a year in advance, and nearly 700 people would share the meal.

For the last several years, chef John Folse had made the gumbo with her oversight, but Chase always showed up and addressed the crowd. She had worked up until a few days before Holy Thursday, her daughter Stella said, but had to be hospitalized.

“She always said you have to do something every day for somebody else,” Folse said. “She told me she tried to never say no. That’s what the school of Leah Chase was all about. You just never say no, and you keep on going.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/02/us/leah-lange-chase-died.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Leah Chase, Creole Chef Who Fed Presidents and Freedom Riders, Dies at 96

“In my dining room, we changed the course of America over a bowl of gumbo and some fried chicken,” she would often say.

Leah Chase, Creole Chef who fed presidents and freedom riders, dies at 96

ATLANTA — There’s a lot that is not for sale at For Keeps, a little bookstore with brick walls on Auburn Avenue, which for decades had been the center of commerce, culture and spirit for this city people call Black Mecca.

That copy of Jet magazine from 1964, the one with Alan Alda and Diana Sands on the cover, illustrating an article about interracial romances in the theater? Not for sale. The book of Swahili names for your baby, or that copy of The African Communist? Nope.

But you are welcome to spend all day here reading, if you like. That’s the point.

“The reason I’m not selling them is because I want people to have as many interactions with them as they can,” said Rosa Duffy, 28, a visual artist with deep Atlanta roots who opened the bookstore in November.

There is plenty to buy, of course. Her shelves hold used black-lit classics from authors like Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Ralph Ellison. If they’re well worn, that’s all the better.

“I think it tells a story,” she said. “Someone actually went through it and read every word and received something from it and you’re next. It’s like they are almost doing you a favor.”

Duffy has always wanted to find a way to work around books. Much of her art includes snippets of text or images from books and journals. It’s a style she developed when she was a teenager and would sneak into her father’s library to find images among his vast collection of books and rare journals like Soulbook, a periodical from the late 1960s and 70s which its Berkeley, California, founders called the revolutionary journal of the black world.

Her father, Eugene Duffy, has worked for three mayors including Atlanta’s first black mayor, Maynard Jackson, and Andrew Young, a close confidant of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. who went on to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and remains a close family friend.

Her dad’s collection, along with her sister’s, was inspiration for the bookstore. “My grandma has a great collection, too,” she said.

After high school, Duffy headed to New York to study at the New School, collecting books along the way. She found some real treasures for cheap, like a hard cover of Pat Parker’s “Jonestown and Other Madness” that she dug out of the Strand bookstore’s dollar bin.

She also spent time wandering through little shops in the East Village, where books on black history were often limited to one small shelf.

“I always thought that if I ever had the chance I wanted to expand that little shelf somehow,” she said.

The chance came after she moved back to Atlanta in 2016 and found herself in a lull between projects. Rent on Auburn Avenue was affordable. Interest in black identity was on the rise. And she had the time and means to make it work.

“It was like all these things were coming together,” she said.

The space used to be a shoe store. In the center of the room, she set up a large round table covered with books, political journals and old magazines available for reading only. Many books for sale are displayed on the walls so that the covers are visible, as if they were works of art. Her own prints hang next to them. Music from Charles Mingus or Atlanta native Waka Flocka Flame is often playing in the background.

The location holds a lot of meaning. It’s not far from the church she grew up going to or from Spelman and Morehouse, two historically black colleges where her parents went to school. It’s a neighborhood on the verge of gentrification and she is determined to help it keep a strong black identity.

“I wanted this space to represent blackness and its vastness but I wanted it to be as inviting as any other bookstore,” she said. “It’s just that our niche is black folks and our revolution and our movements and all the things that we’ve done over time that haven’t been recognized or been altered so that you don’t know the whole truth about them.”

The store drew a big crowd when it opened, in part because her sister, lawyer and journalist Josie Duffy Rice, sent out a tweet about it that filmmaker Ava DuVernay then retweeted.

Duffy said she is constantly learning more about what to buy and what the community wants, often sifting through collections of books and other materials people bring in when a family member dies.

“Black folks in Atlanta are so aware of their blackness and their history, it’s etched in their fabric, as my grandma would say,” she said. “I think that’s why the store has been successful here. People love themselves as black people and they only want to know more. Atlanta encourages you to be as black as you can be.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/08/books/atlanta-bookstore-for-keeps-black-mecca.html" id="cbc492c8-6d5e-3bcd-a06b-821b37cd5047">The New York Times</a>.

(Book Territory)

Where Books Meet Black Mecca

The new Southern food movement that the restaurant in nearby Decatur helped define had not yet moved North. Brooklynites weren’t worshipping biscuits, and American barbecue had not met kimchi. Only a few cooks or writers outside the South were giving serious thought to the connection between Southern food and that of West Africa.

Even here, in the booming cultural and commercial center of the American South, diners had only begun to embrace a style of cooking that emphasized seasonality and history over carbohydrates and caricature. Atlanta’s most popular restaurants were local chains dipped in the glitzy, corporate sheen of the Buckhead neighborhood, and high-end steakhouses like Ruth’s Chris and Morton’s were abundant.

Now, as the city prepares to show off its new $1.5 billion Mercedes-Benz Stadium on Sunday, when the New England Patriots meet the Los Angeles Rams, Atlanta is a more evolved food town than it was then.

Neighborhood beer bars and slick suburban dining rooms alike serve food that shows off Southern agriculture. Food from the region’s vast immigrant population is as celebrated as its local classics.

Although diners remain loyal to local entrepreneurs like Fifth Group Restaurants, which started opening reliable spots like South City Kitchen in the 1990s, the city is less impressed by carpetbagging chains. And the ranks of talented young cooks tired of trying to compete in bigger cities continue to grow.

Still, Atlanta has yet to find its footing among the nation’s great restaurant cities. Wyatt Williams, who recently quit reviewing restaurants for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, wrote in a parting column this month in Atlanta magazine that the dining scene was in a rut, riding an economic boom that has spawned cynical, money-grabbing restaurants “where the rooms are finely appointed, the menus are deeply predictable, and the cooking is barely passable.”

Stephen Satterfield, a former sommelier in San Francisco who founded the food magazine Whetstone, grew up in Atlanta. During a recent trip home, he described Atlanta as an insecure food town, obsessed with how it measures up against cities with outsize culinary reputations.

“It pains me to say it, but here everyone is well-intentioned and there is plenty of capital and resources, so I don’t understand why there aren’t more places that feel of the moment,” he said.

Plenty of Atlanta chefs and diners would disagree, albeit politely. The trick, they advise visitors, is drilling down into the right parts of town.

“You’ve got to get out of downtown,” said the chef Kevin Gillespie, a former Top Chef contestant who has three restaurants here. “Get in your Uber and go to a neighborhood. That’s where you’ll find the great stuff. You’re going to leave the city with a completely different idea of what Atlanta really is.”

Of all the local chefs scrambling to be part of the Super Bowl, Gillespie is the MVP. He runs Gamechanger, a concession inside the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, where his “closed on Sunday” chicken sandwich — an homage to the faith-based policy that keeps Chick-fil-A restaurants shuttered on Sundays, even Super Bowl Sundays — has helped make it the highest-grossing food vendor in the arena.

He is also one of three chefs whom Arthur Blank, a founder of Home Depot who bought the Atlanta Falcons in 2002, approved to cook on Thursday for the NFL owners’ dinner, a traditional meal usually held at a fancy restaurant or a well-appointed home. Blank is staging the dinner at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, not far from the stadium.

“It talks to the history of the city and the great connection the NFL has made with the players around issues surrounding social justice,” Blank said. “We’ve moved from protest to progress.”

(Some critics have complained that all three chefs are white men, though Aaron Jefferson, a general manager from the restaurant Iberian Pig who is African-American, was later added to oversee cocktails and wine.)

Gillespie cautions visitors to not expect a city as explicitly Southern as, say, Charleston, South Carolina. “It’s not ‘Gone With the Wind’ down here,” he said. “Atlanta is a city that has always been about business. It’s not as ‘Hee Haw'-y as people think it might be.”

Rather, Atlanta is a metropolis filled with a lot of people from other places. The city’s population is less than 500,000, but the region, which includes the sprawling suburbs, is home to about 5.9 million. People from small Southern towns have moved here for better jobs, and others from big American cities have come seeking less stress and a lower cost of living. The region’s mix includes immigrants from Mexico, India, South Korea and Vietnam.

That influx feeds a mix of cuisines, many of them represented in hundreds of restaurants and markets on Buford Highway, the biggest concentration of which starts at the city’s northeastern edge and continues for about 10 miles. Taking measure of the highway’s offerings is a heroic task, but good resources to consult are We Love BuHi, a website and Instagram feed dedicated to the strip, and the local food writer Christiane Lauterbach’s dispatches on Twitter and in Atlanta magazine.

Two favorites are the homey Korean grandma food at Yet Tuh and the terrific sambal-sauced okra and noodle and rice dishes at Food Terminal, a modern Malaysian restaurant that shares a parking lot with an expansive multicultural supermarket, a Chinese barbecue spot, a Viet-Cajun seafood restaurant and a tofu house.

Atlanta has rarely met a restaurant trend it didn’t like, and right now that translates to food halls. Some of the best restaurants in town have been carved out of restored industrial spaces. Among them is Watchman’s, in the Krog Street Market, a cheery, Cuban-influenced restaurant that turns sustainably harvested Southern seafood into dishes like grilled fish collars bathed in Alabama white barbecue sauce and dappled with salsa verde. Its perfect daiquiris have developed a loyal following.

Next door is the Ticonderoga Club, a cozy restaurant whose menu ranges from 48 ounces of grilled, sous-vide chuck roast to a coconut-braised eggplant dish that the chef David Bies picked up in Bali. Students of the Southern cocktail scene make regular pilgrimages to its tiny bar.

The grandest food hall of them all is inside the sprawling brick Ponce City Market, a former Sears distribution center developed into a mixed-use complex by the team that created Chelsea Market in New York.

Many of Atlanta’s biggest names in food have a presence here. Hugh Acheson pumps out coffee and fat squares of toast slathered with fresh local cow’s milk cheese and jam at Spiller Park, and Hector Santiago sells a fine medianoche sandwich at El Super Pan. Linton Hopkins (one in the trio of chefs cooking for the NFL owners) offers a stacked cheeseburger at H&amp;F; Burger, and fried chicken and biscuits next door at a little stand called Hop’s Chicken.

Anne Quatrano, the chef who began Atlanta’s farm-to-table era at her flagship restaurant Bacchanalia 25 years ago, sells fresh Gulf shrimp and oysters at W.H. Stiles Fish Camp.

Quatrano, chairwoman of the James Beard Foundation’s awards committee, remains a levelheaded fan of the city’s food. Like Gillespie, she says some of the best food is found in modest, neighborhood restaurants.

“There’s a lot of young talent here,” she said. “Some of it’s raw, but it’s still good. That makes for really good dining at lot of the smaller places.”

One is Banshee, a boisterous restaurant inside a former lesbian bar in the charmingly scruffy East Atlanta neighborhood. Tables are packed with diners who swipe fry bread through smears of pepperoni butter, and debate whether the Sichuan-spiced pork osso buco is better than the braised onion caramelle with braised beef cheeks.

At Tiny Lou’s, inside the newly refurbished Hotel Clermont, not far from Ponce City Market, Jeb Aldrich delivers a smart take on French classics, and the pastry chef Claudia Martinez makes a crêpes suzette cake that customers can’t seem to stop talking about.

Atlanta also is a big breakfast town, which is why in a few weeks Quatrano will open Pancake Social, a 120-seat, all-day breakfast place in Ponce City Market. Until then, Java Jive, Highland Bakery and Home Grown, whose pancakes and chili cheese grits are worth enduring the inevitable line, all make for a fine breakfast field trip.

And don’t forget Waffle House. The original restaurant in nearby Avondale Estates has been turned into the company’s museum, but there are plenty of others in full operation. (Pro tip: Order your hash browns scattered, smothered and covered, with country ham and a pecan waffle cooked dark on the side.)

A hungry visitor also would do well to stroll the Atlanta BeltLine, a 22-mile loop of railroad bed that is slowly being transformed into an urban promenade not unlike the High Line in New York, except with a lot more craft breweries.

Along the well-developed section that winds through the Old Fourth Ward, you’ll find Nina &amp; Rafi, a new restaurant that serves a chicken Parmesan that has passed the test of more than one New Yorker, old-fashioned square pizzas topped with sizzling pepperoni cups, and crunchy-crusted Detroit-style pies.

Expense-account diners can still get a taste of that Buckhead swank at Atlas, in the St. Regis Atlanta hotel. The chef, Christopher Grossman, has a French Laundry pedigree, and the quiet, luxe dining room is hung with masterworks, many of them from the art collection of Joe Lewis, the billionaire behind the Tavistock Group, a private investment company that owns the hotel. Next door is Umi, whose modern take on Japanese food would be at home in New York or Los Angeles.

Many visitors will be on the hunt for the kind of Southern food best eaten with your hands. Barbecue is not hard to find here, but Bryan Furman of B’s Cracklin’ Barbecue is the only pitmaster turning out whole-hog barbecue from heirloom-breed hogs.

The Busy Bee Café, a half-mile from the stadium, has been around since the 1940s, and remains a reliable practitioner of the Southern staple known as the meat and three. Go for the oxtails or the fried chicken, and take whichever vegetable side dishes the server recommends.

The new Southern food movement has been nurtured for 10 years at Miller Union, which serves hyperseasonal dishes alongside the most interesting wine list in town. Or head to Decatur, a small city that abuts Atlanta proper, and try Gillespie’s Revival, which serves the kind of food your Southern grandmother might make if she shopped only at the farmers’ market.

One last piece of advice: Don’t sleep on the wings.

“Wings have become a real part of Atlanta culture,” said Deborah VanTrece, the chef and owner of Twisted Soul Cookhouse &amp; Pours.

VanTrece, who will set up a grits bar and make deviled eggs for 3,000 as part of an NFL-sponsored gameday tailgate party, is a former American Airlines flight attendant who used to eat chicken wings that were delivered to the cockpit when flights took the crew to Buffalo.

“We thought that was everything, but now wings in Atlanta have taken on a life of their own,” she said. Her daughter, who is 26, has long debates with her friends over which of the dozens of places to get wings is the best.

Wings are now so important to the city that the classic Atlanta beer-and-wing spot, J. R. Crickets, was invited to sell them in the State Farm Arena, the home of the Atlanta Hawks, which recently had a $200 million renovation. (Furman sells his barbecue there, too.)

Insiders order lemon pepper wet, a style of wings that got a star turn on the FX series “Atlanta.”

“Atlanta is an easy city to underestimate,” VanTrece said. “Sometimes I think it’s because the South in general gets a bad rap, but compared to 20 years ago, it’s night and day. You just have to make a little effort.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/29/dining/atlanta-restaurants-super-bowl.html" id="fe3c710b-32ef-3b99-a876-9bcf36d9211b">The New York Times</a>.

ATLANTA — In 2000, the last time this city hosted the Super Bowl, the St. Louis Rams beat the Tennessee Titans, and Watershed had been frying its famous fried chicken in peanut oil flavored with country ham for only a year.

A Game Plan for Eating Well in Atlanta

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Kim Severson

Articles written by the author

Leah Chase, Creole Chef who fed presidents and freedom riders, dies at 96

Where Books Meet Black Mecca

A Game Plan for Eating Well in Atlanta