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Edgar Chase Jr., Purveyor of Creole Cuisine, Dies at 88

Edgar Chase Jr., known as Dooky, with his wife, Leah. Their restaurant became an informal gallery for black artists.Credit...The Historic New Orleans Collection, Gift of Harold F. Baquet and Cheron Brylski

Edgar Chase Jr., known as Dooky, who with his wife, the chef Leah Chase, turned his family’s New Orleans restaurant into a showcase for Creole cuisine and a gathering spot for activists during the civil rights era, died on Tuesday in New Orleans. He was 88.

The death was confirmed by his granddaughter Tracie Griffin.

Mr. Chase, a jazz trumpeter, was known throughout the South as the leader of the Dooky Chase Orchestra, a big band that he started in high school; his older sister, Doris, was its vocalist. In the early 1950s, as his father’s health declined, he stepped in to run Dooky Chase, the family’s little bar and grill in the city’s Tremé neighborhood.

When his wife, the former Leah Lange, took her place behind the stove, the restaurant began evolving from a simple cafe into one of the city’s foremost exponents of Creole cooking, as well as an informal gallery for black artists. It became a magnet for black musicians, actors and politicians passing through town and, as the civil rights movement gathered momentum, a meeting place where organizers, both black and white, sat down to plan strategy in the upstairs dining room.

Although Jim Crow laws forbade the races to mix in restaurants, city officials turned the other way in the case of Dooky Chase, fearful of the public response if they tried to intervene.

Mr. Chase, a member of the N.A.A.C.P. and an active campaigner for voting rights, made his restaurant available to local civil rights lawyers and nationally recognized leaders like Thurgood Marshall and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Edgar Lawrence Chase Jr. was born in New Orleans on March 23, 1928. His father, also called Dooky, started the business in 1939 as a corner stand. (It also sold lottery tickets.) His mother, the former Emily Tenette, would make sandwiches, and young Edgar Jr. often delivered them.

With $600 borrowed from a brewery, the Chases enlarged their stand and in 1941 opened the Dooky Chase Restaurant, which quickly became a neighborhood hub, in part because it was one of the few places where black workers could cash their paychecks.

Mr. Chase, after graduating from Booker T. Washington High School, toured with his band, billed as “the Pride of New Orleans.” While performing at a Mardi Gras ball in 1945, he met his future wife, whom he married the next year. She went on to become a much-honored chef, cookbook author and television personality.

She survives him, as do their three children, Stella Reese, Leah Kamata and Edgar Chase III, also known as Dooky; 16 grandchildren; and 26 great-grandchildren.

The restaurant closed for two years after Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, and Mr. Chase and his wife moved into a FEMA trailer across the street. The rebuilding effort moved slowly, in part because Mr. Chase did not like to borrow money, or spend it.

“He wouldn’t give a crippled crab a crutch to get to a gumbo party,” Mrs. Chase told The New York Times in 2003. Two years after the hurricane, Dooky Chase reopened.

Mr. Chase was active in civic affairs for much of his life. He was a board member of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in its formative years and vice president of the New Orleans Tourist Commission from 1978 to 1983.

A correction was made on 
Dec. 1, 2016

An obituary on Nov. 24 about the New Orleans restaurateur Edgar Chase Jr. misspelled his mother’s maiden name. She was the former Emily Tenette, not Tennette.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 13 of the New York edition with the headline: Edgar Chase Jr., Purveyor of Creole Cuisine, Dies at 88. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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