Dooky Chase's

There are restaurants that serve great food, and there are restaurants that made history. Dooky Chase's in the Tremé is, without qualification, both. Emile and Dooky Chase Sr. established the restaurant in 1941 as a lunch counter and lottery outlet on Orleans Avenue; when their son Edgar "Dooky" Chase Jr. and his wife Leah took over in 1946, they transformed it into something the city had never seen: an upscale restaurant in the Tremé where the city's African American community could dine with dignity and distinction. In an era of legal segregation, this was not merely a restaurant. It was a statement.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, Dooky Chase's dining room was where the civil rights movement in New Orleans organised itself. Martin Luther King Jr. ate at these tables. Thurgood Marshall, Ray Charles, James Baldwin, and every significant figure of the era passed through this room. Leah Chase fed them all, and she did not simply serve them — she counselled them, encouraged them, and occasionally scolded them if their strategy seemed insufficiently bold. The restaurant was simultaneously a safe gathering space, a de facto gallery for Black artists (Chase's art collection remains on the walls and constitutes one of the finest collections of African American art in the region), and a kitchen producing cooking of genuine excellence.

Leah Chase — the Queen of Creole Cuisine, as she became known — died in 2019 at the age of 96, still cooking in her kitchen. The restaurant continues under family operation, and the cooking maintains the standards she established over seven decades. The Creole gumbo, with its dark roux and careful balance of pork, chicken, and seafood, is among the finest in a city of exceptional gumbos. The fried chicken, the shrimp Clemenceau, the stuffed shrimp — all benchmarks. The Friday dinner and Saturday dinner service are the best times to experience the full menu in a room that carries its history on every wall. In 2025, the James Beard Foundation named Dooky Chase's an America's Classic — a recognition long overdue and entirely correct.

Bringing a team to Dooky Chase's is an act of deliberate generosity: you are offering them not just dinner but context, history, and the kind of storytelling that makes an evening memorable long after the food is finished. For teams with any connection to New Orleans — visiting for a conference, relocating, working with local partners — this is the table that explains the city. The art on the walls, the history in the room, and the food on the plate together constitute a masterclass in what New Orleans actually is beneath the tourist surface.

Practically, the restaurant accommodates groups well, with tables that allow for the long conversations and shared dishes that characterise a team dinner done correctly. The menu is broad enough to satisfy varying preferences; the price point is accessible compared to other New Orleans institutions of equivalent significance, which means the conversation about the meal does not become a conversation about the bill. The Creole cooking is communal by nature — the gumbo arrives and is discussed; the fried chicken is passed around; the shrimp Clemenceau is shared. Food that requires commentary and engagement is the best food for a team: it gives the table something to talk about that is not work, and that shared pleasure is the precise mechanism by which teams become more than the sum of their individual members.