How This New Orleans Chef Broke An 86-Year Void

Forbes

14-07-2025

Dwynesha 'Dee' Lavigne opened the first African American-owned cooking school in New Orleans in 86 ... More years, continuing the legacy of pioneering chef Lena Richard.
Dwynesha 'Dee' Lavigne remembers the moment everything changed. She was standing in a Whole Foods walk-in cooler, tears streaming down her face, listening to her 15-month-old son's laughter through a phone call. Her mother-in-law had captured the sound—pure joy, infectious and unrehearsed—and Lavigne realized she was missing something irreplaceable.
Twenty minutes later, she walked upstairs and informed the team she was leading that she was quitting her job.
'You're gonna be fine,' she told them. At the time, she was wrong about her team, but right about herself. That decision in 2014 would eventually lead Lavigne to become the second African American woman to own a cooking school in New Orleans since 1937, breaking an 86-year silence that speaks to both the city's complex racial history and its evolving culinary landscape.
Today, from the kitchens of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum in Central City, Lavigne runs Deelightful Roux School of Cooking, the only African American-owned cooking school in New Orleans. Her students gather around stainless steel counters, learning to build layers of flavor in jambalaya while Lavigne weaves together technique and history, personal narrative and cultural preservation.
But to understand why this matters—why one woman's cooking school represents something larger than knife skills and gumbo recipes—you have to go back to the Ninth Ward, where Lavigne learned that food is never really just about food.
Lavigne grew up in a four-bedroom house with seven siblings, where her mother performed daily culinary miracles. 'She cooked two meals most days,' Lavigne recalls. 'The kids would eat right when we got home from school, then my dad would eat when he got home from work.' With eight children and two working parents, efficiency was survival.
But it was Lavigne's paternal grandmother who changed everything. When Dee was 10 years old, her father gave her an ultimatum: 'I want you to start hanging out with my mom. I want her to show you how to make some of my favorite things.' But Lavigne recalled that this grandmother wasn't exactly warm and fuzzy. 'She wasn't this sweet little old lady,' Lavigne remembers. 'She was the stern one who would say, 'You do what I say, you do it now, or there will be trouble.''
Every Saturday became a cooking boot camp. Peach cobbler. Blackberry dumplings. Techniques passed down through generations, refined through repetition and perfected under the watchful eye of a woman who demanded excellence. 'Eventually she taught me pretty much everything I know about baking,' Lavigne says.But the family's food journey took an unexpected turn when Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005. Lavigne had come home to help her sister and got trapped by the storm. For Lavigne, the experience would culminate in 22 hours of driving to escape, sleeping in a makeshift church shelter and telling her mother that she had to choose two trash bags worth of possessions from a lifetime of memories.
'That was probably the hardest thing I ever had to tell my mother,' she recalls of surveying the flood damage. 'You can't have any of these things. They're ruined. You can't clean them enough.'
Before Katrina—and long before culinary school—Lavigne thought she wanted to be an accountant. But college left her uninspired.
'I didn't like traditional college,' Lavigne says. 'I didn't like anything about it, and I couldn't get ahold of it.'
So she did what 17-year-olds do when the heart precedes logic: she followed her heart to Stillwater, Oklahoma, where her high school sweetheart was attending college on a football scholarship. What she found was culture shock. The small town had no alcohol in its grocery stores, everything was closed by six o'clock, and, more egregiously, there was no such thing as red beans in the stores.
Chef Dee Lavigne standing in front of artwork.
Regardless, Lavigne was determined to make memories that would remind her of home, so one day, she set out to cook red beans and rice—something essential, something that said home. When she arrived at the grocery store, the Oklahoma meat manager had never heard of pickle meat, and after a phone call with Lavigne's grocer back in New Orleans, he told her bluntly, 'You ain't gonna find nothin' like that around here.'
So that night, she settled for smoked turkey wings and regular red kidney beans that refused to break down properly. The result was okay, but more importantly, it worked. Soon, professors were asking her boyfriend about his dinner plans. Students called the house wanting to know the next menu, and word soon spread across campus that there was a girl from New Orleans making real southern food.
That first cooking mishap led Lavigne to Meridian Technology Center's culinary program. It was love at first sight,' she says. 'It took me back to being seven, remembering why food had always awakened something in me.
After marrying her high school boyfriend, Lavigne convinced him to leave Oklahoma's flatlands for New York's Hudson Valley, where she would enroll at the prestigious Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park. Soon, the campus became her culinary playground. 'It was probably one of the best eating experiences of my life,' she recalls, where she sampled everything from molecular gastronomy to traditional French techniques, gaining 20 pounds in her first four months as she ate her way through an international curriculum.
The path from Oklahoma to owning a cooking school wound through years of management positions at Whole Foods, the birth of two sons and eventually the launch of Deelightful Cupcakes in 2016. Operating out of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum's commissary kitchen, she built a thriving business with contracts from 1-800 Flowers and Shari's Berries.
Then came 2020 and the pandemic.
'COVID really broke the business,' she admits. 'Everyone was at home. There were no office parties or social events. I knew I had to figure something out.'
The answer came through an unexpected phone call from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Dr. Ashley Rose Young from the National Museum of American History wanted Lavigne to voice a podcast about Chef Lena Richard, the first African American woman to own a cooking school in New Orleans, who had opened her doors in 1937.
Richard had opened her cooking school in 1937 specifically for Black students, teaching 'men and women the art of food preparation and serving in order that they would become capable of preparing and serving food for any occasion and also that they might be in a position to demand higher wages.' She became the first African American to host a cooking show on television in 1949—a decade before Julia Child—and built an empire that included restaurants, catering businesses and an international frozen food company.But what struck Lavigne most was that Richard's school had educated young African Americans with culinary and hospitality skills needed for employment in the Jim Crow South. At the time, her motive was to teach cooking and economic empowerment, especially in an era where the latter was far-fetched.
Making History on 2/2/22
Reading Richard's words for the Smithsonian podcast changed everything. Lavigne began researching obsessively, understanding that she wasn't just learning about a historical figure, but also discovering a paradigm for what she wanted to build. On February 2, 2022, Lavigne opened Deelightful Roux School of Cooking. She chose February for Black History Month, the second day, because she's only the second African American woman to own a cooking school in New Orleans since Chef Lena Richard, and 2022, so the date would never be forgotten. 'We are known as two-two-twenty-two,' she says. 'We make history every day.'
The numbers themselves tell a somber story. It took 86 years for another Black woman to open a cooking school in New Orleans. In a city where African American influences permeate every aspect of cuisine—from the holy trinity of vegetables to the techniques for making roux—the absence of Black ownership in culinary education represents a gap that Lavigne is determined to fill.
'Our faces are the faces of cuisines, of restaurants, of catering companies that we didn't have ownership of,' she explains. 'How can you build a legacy or leave a legacy if it's not even yours?'
Today, Lavigne's classes incorporate hands-on cooking lessons with cultural storytelling. Students learn to make Creole Okra Gumbo while hearing about the city's layered racial history. They perfect their roux technique while understanding how enslaved Africans contributed fundamental elements to what we now call Creole cuisine. As the President of the New Orleans chapter of Les Dames d'Escoffier, the international women in hospitality non-profit founded in 1973, Lavigne has positioned herself not just as a chef-instructor but as an advocate for broader representation in the culinary world.
The cooking school operates three days a week, attracting the culinary tourists that New Orleans & Company counts as vital to the city's $10.5 billion tourism economy. But for Lavigne, the measure of success isn't in visitor numbers but in changing what seems possible.
'If you don't know it's possible by someone that looks like you, it feels impossible to every other kid that may want to do that,' she says. 'I'm here to inspire and say, you can still do it.'
In the museum's exhibits, visitors can learn about Lena Richard's groundbreaking career, her iconic cookbook that challenged racist stereotypes and her television show that brought Creole cooking to living rooms across the South. But downstairs in the kitchen, Lavigne brings that legacy to life in real time.
Lavigne maintains a close friendship with Richard's granddaughter and continues working with the Smithsonian on projects that preserve and celebrate Richard's contributions. She's acutely aware that she stands on shoulders—not just Richard's, but those of countless unnamed cooks whose skills and creativity shaped one of America's most distinctive regional cuisines.
'I often think about how my life would have changed to know that a lady in the city I grew up in was doing what she was doing,' Lavigne reflects. 'As a young girl, would I have just not wanted to be an accountant? Would I have just stayed and stuck to making good food?'
It's a hypothetical question, but for the next generation, the answer could change everything. Every student who takes Lavigne's class, every young person who sees a Black woman owning and operating a cooking school in New Orleans, receives a different message about what's possible.
'I would never have said I would own a cooking school,' Lavigne admits. 'But here I am now, running one, and I love the fact that you can have a dream of something you've never dreamed of.'
In a city that markets its food culture globally while still wrestling with questions of Black ownership and representation, Lavigne has created a space where history is honored and futures are reimagined. She teaches people to cook but also empowers them to understand that ownership is possible, that legacies can be built and that sometimes the most important ingredient in any recipe is the audacity to believe you belong in the kitchen.