The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak

A New Orleans Family Memoir

Randy Fertel

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781496801135
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak is the story of two larger-than-life characters and the son whom their lives helped to shape. Ruth Fertel was a petite, smart, tough-as-nails blonde with a weakness for rogues, who founded the Ruth's Chris Steak House empire almost by accident. Rodney Fertel was a gold-plated, one-of-a-kind personality, a railbird-heir to wealth from a pawnshop of dubious repute just around the corner from where the teenage Louis Armstrong and his trumpet were discovered. When Fertel ran for mayor of New Orleans on a single campaign promise-buying a pair of gorillas for the zoo-he garnered a paltry 308 votes. Then he purchased the gorillas anyway! These colorful figures yoked together two worlds not often connected-lazy rice farms in the bayous and swinging urban streets where ethnicities jazzily collided. A trip downriver to the hamlet of Happy Jack focuses on its French-Alsatian roots, bountiful tables, and self-reliant lifestyle that inspired a restaurant legend. The story also offers a close-up of life in the Old Jewish Quarter on Rampart Street-and how it intersected with the denizens of "Back a' Town, " just a few blocks away, who brought jazz from New Orleans to the world. The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak is a New Orleans story, featuring the distinctive characters, color, food, and history of that city-before Hurricane Katrina and after. But it also is the universal story of family and the full magnitude of outsize follies leavened with equal measures of humor, rage, and rue.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Overture
• Chapter One Hot Springs
• Chapter Two Home Movies And Snapshots
• Chapter Three Thoroughbreds
• Chapter Four South Rampart Street
• Chapter Five Happy Jack
• Chapter Six Bienville School
• Chapter Seven Congo Square
• Chapter Eight Dad’s Day
• Chapter Nine Travels With Papa Dad
• Chapter Ten Chris Steak House
• Chapter Eleven Eshu On The Bayou
• Chapter Twelve Searching For Odysseus
• Chapter Thirteen Ruth’s Chris Steak House
• Chapter Fourteen Corporate And Other Carnivores
• Chapter Fifteen Breaking The Napoleonic Code
• Chapter Sixteen The Empress Of Steak
• Chapter Seventeen Embracing Pahrump
• Chapter Eighteen The Empress’s Last LevÉe
• Coda Katrina’s Aftermath
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Sources