Edgar 'Dook' Chase IV Dishes on Creole Cooking and 'Family Recipe Showdown'

It’s hard to know where to start when unpacking the legacy and deep roots of the Chase family’s role in Creole cuisine, the Civil Rights landscape throughout the 1950s and '60s, and their ongoing work to nourish the stomachs and spirits of everybody who takes a seat at Dooky Chase’s restaurant on the corner of N. Miro Street and Orleans Avenue in New Orleans’s Tremé neighborhood. It’s part art museum, part restaurant, part civil rights historical site and part testament to how hard work and honoring your history pays dividends down the road.

Today, Chef Edgar "Dook" Chase IV is at the helm of the restaurant, which his great-grandfather — Edgar Lawrence “Dooky” Chase I — started as a sandwich and lottery ticket shop in 1941. Dook is also an expert judge and host on the new Food Network series Family Recipe Showdown co-hosted by Octavia Spencer. Family Recipe Showdown is a feel-good competition where home cooks compete for $10,000 by serving Dook and Octavia their family’s most beloved recipes.

Home Is Where the Kitchen Is

When Dook says he grew up in the business, he means it. Like his parents, aunts and uncles before him, he and his siblings and cousins had a front-row, behind-the-scenes pass to Dooky Chase’s from the time they were small children.

“So they gave us free range of this restaurant, right?” Dook explained in an episode of the "Food Network Obsessed" podcast.

“So the bar back in the day had wood slats, and over this one pipe, it created a seesaw. So we would jump on one side, and the other kid would be on the other side. I'm sure the bartender at the time, Miss Joyce, was like, 'Somebody get these kids from behind the bar.' You know there were no rules for us back then,” he laughed.

When his great-grandmother counted cash in the back office, she would let her grandchildren and great-grandchildren keep whatever coins they found on the floor when she was done. “I think she intentionally dropped a handful,” Dook said.

Of course, the kids also found themselves doing some work — it was a family rule: Everybody had to work in the restaurant for at least a little while. As a child, he helped shine silverware and fold takeout boxes. By the time he was a teen, he was helping bus tables and serving guests.

And service is what the Chase family is all about.

Rich Food and Rich History

When Dooky Chase Jr. — a jazz musician — married Leah Lange in 1946, it was she who brought the restaurant into the fine-dining sphere as an upscale spot for the African-American community to get Creole cuisine.

Leah, who grew up about 45 minutes outside of the city, left her family to attend the only Catholic school for African-American women in New Orleans. As she left, her father told her three things: work hard, pray and do for others.

Leah did just that.

“Before she came to the restaurant, she had to work in a French Quarter restaurant where her community couldn’t dine. She wanted to do fine dining for everybody,” Dook explained.

And everybody meant everybody — Black and white diners were welcome at Dooky Chase’s, even before it was legal to dine together.

Archives from The Louisiana Weekly, a newspaper predominantly focused on happenings in New Orleans’s African-American community, are full of references to Dooky Chase’s restaurant. From the beginning, they played host to civic organizations, parties and other gatherings.

As the Civil Rights Movement gained speed, Martin Luther King Jr. and other community activists were welcome to get a bite to eat in the upstairs dining room and get back to strategizing the movement’s next steps. Dooky Chase’s was a hub of political activism and a place to get a fine meal. In addition to civil rights pioneers, Dooky Chase has also fed Jesse Jackson, Duke Ellington, Ray Charles, Thurgood Marshall, Beyoncé and Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush.

Chase-ing the Dream

Dook went to college and got a degree in finance while working at the family restaurant at night and on the weekend. As a dishwasher, he was responsible for cleaning the pots until they were up to his grandmother’s standards.

Cleaning the pots and pans eventually turned into running errands to bring his grandmother ingredients she needed from around the kitchen.

“When I would bring it back, I would just sit there, and I would watch, and I would see what she was doing, and I would ask her questions. [And] if you're asking the chef a question and they're trying to move things out, they're like, ‘Look, I'm focused on this stove, man, you go back to this dishwasher.’

“But I would stay there, and that's how I learned and really got hooked on the kitchen, because I was able to [see] the passion and love the time that she took into showcasing whatever recipe that she was doing,” Dook explained on the podcast.

His degrees took him away from the restaurant for a time, but everything changed after Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans in August 2005 and Dooky Chase’s suffered extensive damage and had to close.

As Dook was sitting with his parents and grandparents at their home in Baton Rouge, his grandmother’s thoughts were not about profits but about the people.

“If I can just get that restaurant back,” Dook remembers his grandmother saying. “Imagine what it would do for the community.”

It shifted his worldview, and he got to work. He left finance and obtained a culinary certificate from Le Cordon Bleu in France. Dooky Chase’s was gutted and restored. The people returned; the neighborhood slowly began to heal, and Dook became the head chef.

Leah’s Legacy

Leah Chase died on June 1, 2019, at the age of 96, but she’s hardly gone. She inspired Tiana in the 2009 Disney movie The Princess and the Frog. Her namesake foundation — the Edgar "Dooky" Jr. & Leah Chase Family Foundation — supports culinary arts, education, cultural arts and social justice. Dooky Chase’s still opens for lunch Tuesday through Friday and serves dinner on Friday and Saturday.

Dook says his grandmother knew the role she’d inadvertently played in the Civil Rights Movement, the Creole culinary scene and support of African-American artists, but that she remained humble about it.

“She understood that she had a love and a passion for people. That is her main thing," he says. "Certainly, she loved food. Certainly, she loved hospitality. Certainly, she loved art, but she loved the everyday person that came into that restaurant.”

The art Leah loved still hangs on the walls at Dooky Chase's — her and Dook Jr.’s favorite piece was called “The Upper Room,” depicting three strong African-American women holding up a house, which resonates with the Chases. “The artist is telling a story, but your story combines with that. The strength and the backbone of my family has always been the women in my family,” Dook says.

Dook also includes African-American art in his growing number of restaurants. At Chapter IV, which serves Creole breakfast and lunch, his favorite piece is a painting by Delita Martin that features the silhouette of a woman reaching back — which is exactly where Dook says he is: his opportunities come from the hard work that came before him.

“Each piece speaks to us in the family. We don’t hang pieces to hang pieces,” Dook said.

Family Recipe Showdown

As for Dook’s role on Family Recipe Showdown, he really enjoyed watching families from different cultures and backgrounds work together in timed cooking challenges that allow them to showcase their family’s best recipes.

“Family Recipe Showdown has been very fascinating and I love every bit of it,” he says. “You start to see in this world that we’re not too far different.”

On each episode of the show, three teams of two people compete for $10,000 as they work through a unique challenge. In one episode, Dook and Octavia challenge the teams to bring their best cast-iron dishes. Another episode is all about family dishes based on family superstitions. All episodes bring small stories about how the family recipes came to be — and within food, all cultures and backgrounds are unified.

“I tell people that all the time. Everyone has a food memory, whether your hand was in a pot or you were just in the kitchen listening to stories or doing some other element. And I think as we were sharing our food stories and sharing the upbringing of what we did in the kitchen and family gatherings, you find that common ground,” Dook says.