Paige Halter:
When you come to New Orleans, you can immediately feel that food isn’t just a part of life — it is life. It’s history. It’s celebration. It’s identity.

You don’t even have to be in the city to hear about the different types of cuisine offered, the terms Creole and Cajun will likely come to mind.

Creole is simply the mix of many cultures, a common phenomenon in Louisiana where European settlers, Indigenous Americans and Africans forcibly relocated during the slave trade all met. Cajun refers specifically to French settlers.

Creole scholar Barry Jean Ancelet says that Louisiana has been a constantly evolving gumbo – pun intended – of cultures for centuries. From a culinary perspective, the only criteria for what sticks and what doesn’t is whether something tastes good or not.

New Orleans sits at the confluence of the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico, making its culinary traditions deeply tied to trade, migration, and cultural exchange. This year also marks the 20-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a catastrophe that reshaped the city’s geography, demographics, and foodscape, especially along racial lines.

In this episode of Who Owns the Flavor – we’ll dive deep into the emotional ties food holds for families, and how a community remains knit together through faithfulness – and flavor.

At the heart of New Orleans food culture stands Dooky Chase’s, a legendary Creole establishment.

They opened their doors all the way back in 1941, bubbling with food, music, and potential - all amidst a crucial time for the United States. The Civil Rights movement.

Edgar “Dook” Chase:
Dookie Chase opened in 1941 as a bar and sandwich shop, later developed into the dining rooms that we have today. But during that time, we had the Civil Rights Movement. During that time, we were in a segregated south where this room right now would have been illegal to eat, but never was there time at Dooky Chase. Our doors was always open to both Blacks and whites and whoever else in this community that wanted to move this community forward.

Halter:
That’s Edgar “Dook” Chase, grandson of Leah Chase and the executive chef at Dooky Chase’s Restaurant.

Before the United States Supreme Court reversed its 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, Dooky Chase’s Restaurant had become the hot spot for discussing issues of civil and economic rights in the African-American community.

Edgar:
But that dining room held civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, people who just understood the importance of a diverse room, a diverse community, moving the country forward.

Halter:
Imagine that. A room typically meant for sharing meals, now sharing a key individual in history. Dook recalls how a high school visit with his son illustrated the importance of a place open to everyone:

Edgar:
We went to some high schools, and the guy had us looking under a microscope, and he said, you see that this is water from the bayou. He said, what you see is the biodiversity of the bayou. And in science, the more biodiversity you have, the healthier the ecosystem. Mother Nature has always been trying to tell us the right way. We always get it wrong. We fight ourselves over stuff that's just not important.

Halter:
To celebrate differences instead of allowing them to pull people apart - the restaurant was more than just what was seen on the menu, and it was highlighted by a certain Queen of Creole Cuisine - Leah Chase.

Dottie:
Leah Chase, his grandmother, who's no longer with us, but she is. You will feel her spirit all through this restaurant today. You will feel the spirit in the food. You'll feel her soul.

Halter:
That’s Dottie Belletto, a local entrepreneur who champions NOLA cuisine and Leah Chase. Mrs. Chase would not only introduce one of the first African American fine dining restaurants to the Country, but also showcase African American Art. Dooky Chase’s Restaurant was the first art gallery for black artists in New Orleans.

Dottie:
She's had presidents in this restaurant. She's had dignitaries from all over the world.

Halter:
Outside the restaurant is a path of tiles with the names of all the community leaders who have eaten at Dooky Chase’s. The Legacy Walk still stands today as a visual acknowledgment of the people who shaped not only the restaurant, but the city itself.

Edgar:
You know that history of people coming through this dining room trying to make this world a better place, this community a better place. We wanted to acknowledge those in that Legacy Wall.

Halter:
The Legacy Walk is more than a collection of faces — it is a reminder of why Dooky Chase’s became a sanctuary in the first place. A place where people weren’t just fed, but seen. A place where difference wasn’t a threat, but a strength.

Edgar:
This city is built on culture. It's built on a lot of different influences when you look at it, right? We had the French coming in, we had the Spanish, we had the Native Americans. We had West African influence, Italian influence. That is our cuisine.

Halter:
Tons of influence plus tons of family history. These two factors are the recipe behind the cuisine at Dooky Chase’s restaurant.

Halter:
So when it comes to owning a flavor, dish, or idea, Dook says its more than just an idea you can replicate, it’s a story. A story that is more unique than any recipe you can find online.

Edgar:
One thing that they can't take and you can't buy is the story. You can't buy the story of my great grandparents. You can't buy the story of his parents and all that. So yeah, you can go across the world and say, we have New Orleans gumbo and shout out to Leah Chase. We have Dookie Chase Gumbo on a menu, but, and it may, I don't think it tastes the same, because they're not using the same ingredients, knowing what to do. They know how we make it, but you can't recreate what we have here because of that history. And that's one thing that I love about this city.

Halter:
Owning a flavor in New Orleans isn’t really about ownership at all. It’s about stewardship — about protecting the meaning behind the meal. At Dooky Chase’s, that idea comes up again and again. Dishes don’t just appear on the table; they arrive carrying ancestry, labor, and memory.

Edgar:
I don't care how much you read on the phone and how much you read on the internet, there's no way to replicate history in that manner. So one, yes, you do have to protect it, because there's so many people that try to, unfortunately, monetize a story that's not this, monetize some things that's not this. But, you know, when you see the true passion and the hard work behind it, you know it's hard.

Halter:
The monetization of a recipe or dish is what Dook says muddles the story behind it. Similar to the Italian family restaurants on the Hill, generations come back to places like Dooky Chase because the flavors don’t drift; they anchor people to their memories.

Edgar:
And what we love is when a grandmother comes in with her grandkids, but before she came in as that grandkid. And she has that memory, so now you see that generation coming through with the same memory. And she can say, ‘I remember coming here and tasting that gumbo, and it tastes the exact same way as when my grandmother brought me’ and those experiences. So a lot of dishes here, we want to make sure they're true and consistent, and the classics remain the classics.

Halter:
But in a city as storied as New Orleans, protecting flavor isn’t just about what happens inside the kitchen — it’s also about understanding the community that surrounds it. And that begins with respecting the place itself.

Edgar:
Don't come in and start to think just because you were here for a year or two, that you understand the fabric of this city. And you may say this shouldn't be the way it shouldn't be, because this – the fabric of the city is the fabric of the city before you were here.

Halter:
It’s a history that’s been bubbling up for decades, growing deeper and deeper as time goes on. Chef Frank Brigsten has been cooking for over fifty years, and teaches contemporary Creole and Acadian cuisine in New Orleans.

Frank Brigtsen:
I was just so proud and happy for this city that we continued to evolve and grow. And to use the most basic analogy possible, think of a tree, has roots, that’s me. A tree has a trunk, that's the next step, and then all these beautiful limbs and leaves start to grow and blossom, and that's how our restaurant culture is.

Halter:
A culture dressed with tons of flavor. But does that mean the culture owns the flavor?

Edgar:
It has to come from you and your heart, whether your grandmother created the recipe, whoever, but it has to be your story. If you're trying to chase somebody else's story, you're going to fall – the restaurant business is hard enough to operate, in of itself, it’s gonna be double as hard when you’re trying to chase something that's not true to who you are. So stay true to who your flavors are, tell your story, do your food.

Halter:
It’s protecting the flavor rather than owning it. Using the flavor as a mechanism to tell a story unique to your family -- something no one else can take from you.

Edgar:
But when you look at the menu here and you see our staples that's been around for the 85 years we're coming up on, we want them to taste the same, because we want those people that are loyal to us to bring back those memories matter. Experiences matter.

Halter:
The flavor becomes the experience -- a taste that tells a story. For restaurants in New Orleans, as years go on, even as the city changes, the recipes remain the same…

Halter:
New Orleans is beautifully situated between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. It served as a great place for trading resources beginning in the 1800s. Today, its proximity to the Gulf still provides the seafood that fuels the cajun and creole restaurants -- as well as their stories.

Wayne Baquet Senior, a third generation member of the famous culinary Baquet family, says that cuisine is made or broken by its place in the community. He owns and operates Lil Dizzy’s, a historic creole restaurant in Treme.

Wayne M. Baquet. Sr.:
The location, location, location, that's very important. A lot of people don't understand that if you have the wrong location, you really, really got to work extra hard to get it done.

Halter:
But it was that location that primed New Orleans for one of the worst natural disasters in United States history. Over twenty years ago, on August 29 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans.

Brigtsen:
Katrina was a real trigger for change in the demographic. People came to help Habitat for Humanity, whatever it might be, and they fell in love with this place, and they moved here. I know several.

Halter:
The hurricane fundamentally restructured New Orleans. The movement of people, buildings and landscapes also meant the movement and evolution of cuisine. In the year after Katrina, the population halved due to migration. ¹

In the year 2000, New Orleans had the highest rate of Black poverty of any major city in the US, and majority-Black neighborhoods were the most harshly impacted by the hurricane. This means that far more Black families left the city than white families, never to return. ²

While it’s difficult to determine the exact demographic changes over the last twenty years, you can get a sense for an influx of new neighbors from Hispanic or Asian cultures from the changes in local food.

Ian McNulty:
You know, there is some, some hand wringing about, like, ‘Ah, well, you know if, if every ramen shop is replacing a PO boy shop or something, is it diluting our culture?’ I don't think so, because I think it's I think it's healthy to have a greater palette of things as long as long as the base is there.

Halter:
That’s Ian McNulty, a food journalist whose years of experience eating and writing makes him a trusted voice among New Orleans locals. He says that New Orleans flavors don’t actually solidify in restaurants – they’re born in people’s homes.

McNulty:
Just in my realm as someone who follows restaurants obsessively, it is like the underlying food culture that comes from home cooking, that comes from the gumbo in the back of the stove that powers the whole food scene here, that gives it an audience,. Your population is sort of trained on this – to have this palette of ‘oh this is what really good flavorful food is like,’ and they take that with them when they want to go check out Korean food.

Brigsten:
This is not the neighborhood I knew. It's not, and so I think the lesson for me, and maybe the lesson you should consider, is not to hate change, but to embrace it. No, it's not the neighborhood I used to live in, but it's a pretty cool neighborhood.

Halter:
There are legitimate concerns related to the neighborhoods changing. There is no doubt that the losses after Katrina were very real. And as the gaps are filled back in and some neighborhoods become more expensive and less accessible, restaurants like Dooky Chase’s are fighting back against concerns about gentrification and the co-opting of culture.

Edgar:
No matter how much this neighborhood changes and people may be coming in and build a million dollar house next door, I'm not changing my price to you. I want to make sure my neighbor that's been here for 60 years across the street can still come in here and dine in this restaurant.

Sources

¹ “New Orleans population numbers remain lower 20 years after Katrina” by Emilee Calametti
https://neworleanscitybusiness.com/blog/2025/08/26/new-orleans-population-decline-since-hurricane-katrina/

² “Katrina at 20: Race, Wealth, and Recovery” by Anissa Durham
https://wordinblack.com/2025/08/katrina-at-20-race-wealth-and-recovery/