Edgar 'Dook' Chase IV and the Chase family launch a cooking show on WYES - NOLA.com

The grandson of the late Leah Chase, Edgar “Dook” Chase IV is the executive chef for Dooky Chase’s Restaurant and owner of the recently opened Chapter IV restaurant. He and fellow family members, including chefs Cleo Robinson and Zoe Chase, recorded “The Dooky Chase Kitchen: Leah’s Legacy,” a 26-episode cooking show that explores the history of the restaurant and family through their dishes. The show recently debuted on WYES and airs at 10 a.m. Saturdays as well as on other PBS stations around the nation. For more information about Dooky Chase’s, visit dookychaserestaurants.com, and for more about the series, visit dookychase.wyes.org.

Gambit: How did you choose to become a part of the family business?

Edgar Chase IV: Like many of us in the family, we all grew up in the business. I started off bussing tables, waiting tables, and I moved to the back and started washing dishes in my grandmother’s kitchen. I would wash her pots and all that great stuff. I’d be the errand guy. She’d be like, get me an onion and this spice. That’s how I first fell in love with the kitchen: watching her cook and commanding her stove.

But I got an undergraduate degree at Dillard in economics and finance. Then I got a masters of business administration from UNO. I was working in corporate America for a while, though I’d help out at the restaurant a bit.

Then Katrina hit, and everybody moved from New Orleans. We were able to get a house in Baton Rouge. My grandmother would have been about 80. My grandfather would have been in his late 70s, but they were anxious to get back and clean that restaurant and get it up and running. That really shifted my whole focus. I started diving in and helping gut out the restaurant and cleaning and helping get it back open. That’s when I decided to make the move to full-time hospitality.

Gambit: What do you want the series to show about the family and restaurant?

Chase: There are documentaries about Dooky Chase, but there wasn’t one that operated through the lens of food, the cuisine that we have. In the series, we show the history of Dooky Chase through the cuisine and how it evolved. You start with Dooky Chase’s opening up as a bar and sandwich shop. We touch on po-boys and the hungry man po-boy, which was a french fry po-boy. We take that up to the civil rights era and those dinners, and our Holy Thursday gumbo z’herbes, all these different events all the way up to now.

Zoe (Chase) introduces some modern plays on some of these dishes. We bring it through all the Creole classics as we evolve from a sandwich shop to a fine dining restaurant. And we focus on the generational aspect of touches on the menu, all while telling the story of Dooky Chase.

It shows people how we learned in the kitchen. There wasn’t a recipe book you picked up. It’s looking at the stove of whoever’s cooking. For me, it was my grandmother — seeing what she’s doing, tasting it, going back and trying to recreate it. What viewers are getting a chance at is watching us make these recipes. That’s exactly how we learned. There’s a lens of food, but it’s a cooking school like how we learned in that restaurant. You have to talk about each step so people get it. We had so much fun with it. It was a blast.

It has a local feel of, hey, we want to show you what we do in the kitchen and let you get a feel for how authentic we are. This is still Leah’s kitchen.

Gambit: The upcoming episode is titled “Queen’s Day.” What’s it about?

Chase: Queen’s Day is Jan. 6. That’s my grandmother’s birthday. It’s on King’s Day, the start of Mardi Gras celebrations and all that good stuff. We always do a big happy birthday celebration at the restaurant. King cakes are introduced that day, but we call ours a queen’s cake. We do a Mardi Gras play on bread pudding. We have the colored sugars that we put on it. It’s a celebration of her birthday.

For this latest Queen’s Day, it was not only a celebration of my grandmother’s birthday, but of my niece Zoe, our fifth-generation chef, being introduced as a new chef at Dooky Chase’s Restaurant. She graduated from culinary school and is taking some of the reins of the kitchen. She created a five-course meal (on Queen’s Day). One of them was a seafood stew. We go through that.

Watching that cooking process is beautiful in terms of flavor making, because it’s a two-pot process. In one, you’re making your stock that you’re going to cook your clams in. Then you’re going to pull the clams out and use another pot to build the base of your stew. You have your onions, bay leaf, garlic, thyme and a little tomato paste and a little bit of hot sauce to give it a little bit of heat. Then you add that clam stock, and you cook your different seafood depending on the time it needs to cook. There’s cod, shrimp and the clams that are going back in. You have a full-flavored seafood broth. This is something that’s not normally on the Dooky Chase’s menu. People loved it.

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2023-05-07 14:00:00Z
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