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.
- 306 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
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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
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Yes, you can access The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak by Randy Fertel in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Social Science Biographies. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.