Leah Chase: On August the 29th, I'll never forget that day, Dooky Chase really took a whipping. We had five feet of water. Five feet of water on the bar, about three feet in the dining rooms. My whole restaurant is gone. It is gutted all out. I have nowhere to start, nothing.
Leah Chase: Oh, this is a disaster. This was once my beautiful dining room. HA. That was just there. We had to rip out that wall because you see they tell you, you rip out a foot or a couple of feet over where the water stop, and the water stopped along here like two feet. I worked the kitchen seven days a week from eight o'clock until we close at night. And that can get a bit weird. And you wonder how you did it or how you'd do it again if you have to do it. But I'd like to be doing it again.
Back in the old days, I married into the restaurant. In '41 My mother in law lived next door. But you have to understand now, in '41, African Americans did not eat out. Well they had no place to eat out to begin with. They had no restaurants, as we know restaurants today. Everybody; Duke Ellington, as great as he was, there was no place for him to eat, he had to eat here. King Cole had to eat here. Everybody had to eat here.
Oh, mercy. These kettles, I'm glad nothing happened to them. See because the water didn't get up to maybe nine inches. But I can make 20 gallons of gumbo in here, and 30 gallons in here. So one lady say "You can't get rid of that stove. Some museum wants this stove. Look how many people you've cooked for on this stove." Well, I cooked for a lot of people. I cooked for Thurgood Marshall on this stove. I cooked for Big Daddy King on this stove. I cooked for everybody on this stove.
Leah Chase: But I think it's time for Leah to get another stove.
Leah Chase's Husband: I agree.
Leah Chase: Oh, Lord, he agrees. He agrees I get another stove.
Leah Chase: This is going to be a quick gumbo. You know the kitchen to me is what saves me. And that's the way it is in New Orleans. If you lose a member of your family, people start bringing you food. Food is like a healer to us. And when we give it to you, we feel we doing something great for you.
Leah Chase: We don't need to baptize. You know that's what the Creoles would say, you know. They make this giant pot of gumbo. Now you'd make a pot of gumbo, like that pot, in the average family. So when you got more guests, you know they say, oh Lord, here come more guests, we got to baptize the gumbo. So that meant you had to put a little bit more water in the gumbo.
Leah Chase: More people don't understand about my restaurant more than anything else, I had to build a whole community. People wonder why you do what you do, why you stay in the neighborhood. Well you stay where you're comfortable and you stay where you're needed. And I feel that we need to be here. We need to save our neighborhood.
John Biguenet, Writer: When you travel outside New Orleans, if you're a New Orleanian, you feel as if you're always in exile. People, in our experience, after we fled New Orleans, because of Katrina, could not have been more generous to us. Everywhere we went, we were offered the kindest hospitality. But every gesture of that hospitality reminded us we weren't home. The food was different, the accent was different, the coffee was weaker. Everything pushed us to come back, where we'd be among our friends and our community.