Dooky Chase’s reopens upstairs dining room where Civil Rights history was made. See inside
Dodie Smith-Simmons is one of the Freedom Riders, a hero of the Civil Rights Movement. She stepped into the small upstairs dining room at Dooky Chase’s Restaurant on Monday evening with a feeling of both joy and reverence.
“This is where it happened,” she said. “When people come, now they can see it, I’m so glad it’s back.”
Dooky Chase’s Restaurant is known for its Creole cuisine, for traditions that span generations, and for its role in the Civil Rights Movement. Key moments in that history transpired in the upstairs dining room, a place where activists, attorneys and allies could meet to strategize.
Now, a physical manifestation of that history has been brought back and given new life, all with an eye very much toward the present.
Twelfth Night, Jan. 6, is the birthday of the late Leah Chase, the celebrated chef and matriarch of the restaurant family. She would’ve been 102 this year. Her family chose the day to unveil the newly renovated upstairs dining room.
The space will serve as a private dining room for the restaurant, available for events and special dinners. Edgar “Dook” Chase IV, one of the restaurant’s operators, said it will be “a chef’s playground,” with specially curated menus tailored to each gathering.
It might be the most community-minded of private dining rooms, and it is much more than a restaurant amenity. To envision a new design within its four walls, the Chase family worked closely with New Orleans artists Ron Bechet and Ayo Scott, as well as students from Xavier University’s art program, including Starr Smith, Kaionah Cooper and Adaeze Crenshaw.
The result is a space that feels like an art installation and a storytelling tool as much as a hospitality venue.
“We honor the people who inspired that room, but it’s about people today seeing themselves in that room,” said Stella Reese Chase, daughter of Leah Chase.
“We’re a multi-generation family restaurant, and we have multigenerational customers,” she said. “We felt it was important to connect the generations here. We felt we needed to give this back to our community.”
Rising to the moment
Opened in 1941, Dooky Chase’s evolved from a neighborhood joint into a destination restaurant, a place for important dinners and social gatherings in the Black community during the segregation era.
By the 1950s, with the Civil Rights Movement gaining ground in New Orleans, the restaurant also became a meeting place for activists and civic leaders, both Black and White. Such gatherings defied segregation laws. The police didn’t intervene, though the Chase family did receive threatening notes, and a pipe bomb was once hurled at the restaurant.
“They were brave,” Smith-Simmons said. “They were putting their business on the line and their lives and the safety of their family. But they did what was right instead of following the law of the land at the time.”
Groups packed into the upstairs dining room for planning sessions, while restaurant staff shuttled food up the narrow staircase.
One of the groups that frequently used the space was the Congress of Racial Equality, whose leaders, including Oretha Castle Haley, Jerome Smith and Rudy Lombard, developed peaceful protest campaigns here.
“They’d go out in the streets, they would go to jail, they did what they had to do, but first they ate with us,” Leah Chase said in a 2016 interview.
The restaurant hosted and nourished, and it also provided a safe place for people to convene, a role it would continue over generations.
As the restaurant evolved through successive renovations, the second floor’s use changed, including stints as an office and storage for the restaurant’s art collection. But its significance was never forgotten by the family.
It was Edgar Chase III, Leah Chase’s son, who championed the project to bring it back. He died in February at age 74, knowing the work was well in hand. The rest of the family carried the project to completion.
Designed to inspire
Today, the upstairs dining room has the same scale and contours as before, while a newly installed elevator makes it more accessible. The room juts out of the restaurant roofline like a small tower, or the hump on a camelback house. It’s not a large space, with seating for perhaps three dozen people.
“It’s the smallest footprint with the largest legacy,” said Tracie Haydel Griffin, a granddaughter of Leah Chase and one of the restaurant operators.
The redesigned space today is rich with symbolism, from the magnolia pattern of the wallpaper (Leah Chase’s favorite bloom) to landmark civil rights achievements written on the steps rising to the room.
Those stairs lead to one mural of the Chase family, with some represented in shadows and symbols, signifying that another generation is always coming behind the last. Another mural stretches across half of one wall, depicting meetings that happened here. A small video display at the entrance plays a short documentary with interviews of people who were part of the room’s history.
Perhaps no aspect is more important to the Chase family than mirrors positioned on the walls. Visitors can see themselves in the room, and at some angles within the murals of faces from the past. It brings a powerful metaphor to life.
“When you’re in that room, you think about how it was everyday people who saw what needed to change and played their role,” said Dook Chase. “I want people to get inspired, I want them to think. I can see myself with the people who sat in those chairs. We want people to see themselves as the next wave moving forward.”