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Cleveland Daily Banner—Wednesday, January 6, 2016—23
New TV tech promises sharper
colors, but not much to watch
By Ryan nakashima
AP Business Writer
AP Photo
LeAh ChASe shakes hands with patrons Susan Actor, center, and Lisa Fisher, of Mt. Vernon,
Washington, at her family’s restaurant, Dooky Chase’s Restaurant, in New Orleans. New Orleans restaurateur Leah Chase broke the city’s segregation laws by serving white and black customers, including civil
rights leaders like Thurgood Marshall. She strove to provide an upscale, white-tablecloth dining experience at a time when none existed for blacks in the city. And after Hurricane Katrina she lived in a FEMA
trailer for months as her beloved Dooky Chase’s Restaurant was being rebuilt, and she still goes to work
daily. She said she has few regrets. Well, maybe one. “Maybe I should have worked harder. I don’t know.
But I did the best I could do.”
Queen of Creole Cuisine, Leah
Chase, is still cooking at age 93
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Leah
Chase has spent her culinary life
on the cutting edge of history,
mixing fine dining with her
southern Louisiana roots at her
classic New Orleans restaurant,
Dooky Chase’s.
She broke the city’s segregation laws decades ago by serving
white and black customers,
including civil rights leaders like
Thurgood Marshall. She offered
an upscale, white-tablecloth dining experience at a time when
none existed for blacks in the
city. Her jambalaya, fried oysters,
shrimp Creole and Gumbo des
Herbes have introduced countless people to Creole cooking.
The woman who’s been
dubbed the Queen of Creole
Cuisine says she has few regrets
— maybe just one.
“Maybe I should have worked
harder. I don’t know. But I did
the best I could do,” says Chase,
sitting in the dining room during
a recent lunch rush, while fielding tourists’ requests for autographs of her cookbooks or photos.
The notion that Chase hasn’t
worked hard enough would
shock her customers. Using a
walker, she still goes table to
table and greets diners and steps
into the kitchen to make sure her
fried chicken is crispy on the outside and moist on the inside.
Chase, who turns 93 on
Wednesday, has spent most of
her life cooking and directing the
restaurant named after her husband in Treme, a historic
African-American neighborhood.
New Orleans restaurateur John
Besh calls her an “ambassador of
our food, our people of south
Louisiana,” where she prepares
classic dishes like red beans and
rice or shrimp Clemenceau.
The restaurant opened in 1941
serving sandwiches and lottery
tickets. Not until after Chase
married her husband Dooky in
1946 was it gradually redes