The Big Easy family saga of an eccentric father, a workaholic mother, and the birth of the Ruth's Chris Steak House empire

"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 O'Brien

"lots of new orleans history in this family story, which is wilder than the gorillas and almost as juicy as the steaks." --Roy Blount Jr.

"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

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.

Randy Fertel, New Orleans, Louisiana, and New York, New York, is a writer and president of both the Fertel Foundation and the Ruth U. Fertel Foundation. He has taught English at Harvard, Tulane, LeMoyne College, the University of New Orleans, and the New School for Social Research.

288 pages (approx.), 6 x 9 inches, 70 b&w photographs, 2 maps