Randy Fertel - The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak: A New Orleans Family Memoir

This memoir was a complete pleasure, beginning to end, full of love and zaniness and tenderness and absolutely fascinating detail. Randy Fertel was blessed with an incredible wealth of anecdote, and his prose brings it all vividly to life. What a fine piece of writing this is.

TIM OBRIEN
National Book Awardwinning author of The Things They Carried

The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak is a one-of-a-kind real-life tale, as layered, rich, and full of surprises as a street map of New Orleans. Randy Fertel had the good fortune to be born to a pair of American originals, and his parents had the great fortune to live out their fascinating lives in front of a son whos a natural-born storyteller. This is one of my favorite books of the year.

MARK CHILDRESS
New York Times bestselling author of Georgia Bottoms and Crazy in Alabama

With unsparing honesty and love, Randy Fertel unravels the mystery of his eccentric, legendary parents. The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak is by turns wry and sad, hilarious and heartbreaking, but always, always delectable.

STEWART ONAN
award-winning author of Emily, Alone

This wonderfully affecting family memoir is a well-told tale of personalized social history, a sentient evocation of the sights, sounds, tastes, smells and feel of New Orleans and its sprawling interface with the mighty river and gulf that are its hope and despair, its inescapable fate. Drawing from 200 years of his familys thrive-and-survive presence on the lip of a watery grave, Randy Fertel gives us a palpable sense of its essenceas close as you can get without living there yourself.

JOHN EGERTON
author of Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History

Fortune gave Randy Fertel this zany cast of characters: the shoplifting grandmother, the litigious, multimillionaire mother with a taste for the ponies, the father whose family made its money in pawn shops. But from this rich raw material he has added his own wit, meticulous research, and gift for telling a tale. Read this book for the joy of it. But be forewarned. If youre not careful, youll laugh your way into a knowledge of running a steak house, collecting debts from the mafia, and taking the family out of a family business.

LOLIS ELIE
Story editor HBOs Treme, co-producer PBSs Faubourg Treme

The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak is that rare memoir that manages to be both intimately personal and yet of broad appeal. For it is truly the portrait of a generation, even as it brings vividly to life a panoply of individual characters in New Orleans. They may be black or white or Creole; they may be male or female. But all fill the reader with joy and wonder, and a fair share of tears as well. Beautifully written, affectionate, witty, this book tugs us from one cover to the other.

DAVID H. LYNN
Editor, The Kenyon Review

Who better to deliver the strange soul of New Orleans, a city we cant live without, than Randy Fertel? Ruth and Rodneys child, who suffered and gloried terribly at their hands, is New Orleanss latest beautiful family memoirist.

PAUL HENDRICKSON
National Book Award finalist and author of Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott

THE GORILLA MAN
AND THE
EMPRESS OF STEAK

A NEW ORLEANS FAMILY MEMOIR

RANDY FERTEL

WILLIE MORRIS BOOKS IN MEMOIR AND BIOGRAPHY

www.upress.state.ms.us

Designed by Peter D. Halverson

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

Illustrations are from the collection of the author except where otherwise noted.

Portions of this book appeared in different forms in New Orleans Magazine, Corn Bread Nation 2: The Best of Southern Food Writing, Kenyon Review, My New Orleans: Ballads to the Big Easy, ed. Rosemary James, Intersection / New Orleans, ed. Anne Gisleson, Gastronomica, Creative Nonfiction, Zenchilada, and the play Native Tongues, directed by Carl Walker.

Copyright 2011 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fertel, Randy.
The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak : a New Orleans family memoir / Randy Fertel.
p. cm.(Willie Morris books in memoir and biography)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61703-082-6 (cloth : alk. paper)ISBN 978-1-61703-083-3 (ebook)
1. Fertel, Rodney. 2. Fertel, Ruth. 3. Fertel, RandyChildhood and youth. 4. Fertel, RandyFamily. 5. New Orleans (La.)Biography. 6. RestaurateursLouisianaNew OrleansBiography. 7. BusinesspeopleLouisianaNew OrleansBiography. 8. New Orleans (La.)Social life and customs. I. Title.

F379.N553A227 2011
976.335dc22 2011010691

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

for Matt and Owen
in an effort to turn the page
on the family legacies

Steak for all of us immigrants means America.
BETTY FUSSELL

The image of a wild animal becomes a starting point for a daydream.
JOHN BERGER

THE GORILLA MAN
AND THE
EMPRESS OF STEAK

THE OLYMPIA BRASS BAND PLAYED DIDNT SHE RAMBLE AFTER MY mothers body had been cut loose, as the saying goes in New Orleans, placed in the mausoleum she and her best friend had built together. As is customary in New Orleans, the band played a dirge, A Closer Walk with Thee, on the way to the entombment. Then, turning from the grave, we celebrated the life:

Didnt she ramble she rambled
Rambled all around in and out of town
Didnt she ramble didnt she ramble
She rambled till the butcher cut her down.

The mourners formed the second line behind the band and the familywhat there was of itmarching or dancing to the syncopated rhythms, waving handkerchiefs and twirling umbrellas in the hot mid-April sun. Everyone knew this was the way it should be. Though she grew up in the Mississippi Delta south of New Orleans, Ruth Fertel was born in New Orleans and had thrived there, reigning as one of the great restaurateurs in a city of great restaurants.

The brass band celebrated the considerable rambling she had managed. I had just done the same in my eulogy. A good friend, who knew of my conflicts with my mother, told me later he had a moment of panic when I rose to give it. I didnt know which speech you would give, he laughed. I knew either one could have been honest.

Ramble she did indeed. And not often in ways most would count ordinary. One night at dinner, in the late 1990s, five or so years before, my mother announced that she and Lana Duke had purchased a plot at the prestigious Metairie Cemetery and would build a tomb together. For almost thirty years, Lana Duke had worked hand-in-hand with Mom to develop the advertising and the Ruths Chris brand. As Moms empire grew, Lana not only worked for the company but also became part of it, owning franchises in San Antonio and Toronto. But I was stunned. A Fertel-Duke tomb? There goes Lana again