Unlocking the mystery behind Ruth's Chris steakhouse

Got steak? Meet author and Ruth’s Chris Steak House heir Randy Fertel discussing and signing The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak: A New Orleans Family Memoir (University Press of Mississippi, $28) Monday,  8pm Books & Books, Coral Gables.

The Gorilla Man is the story of two larger-than-life characters. 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. The chain was founded by the single mother of tw, in 1965, after she bought the existing Chris Steak House.

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. 

 Randy Fertel, a former manager of Ruth’s Chris Steak House in New Orleans,  remembers interrupting high school homework to make emergency bread runs. He also served as Director of Marketing for the national corporation.

This story was originally published January 27, 2012 at 11:01 PM with the headline "Unlocking the mystery behind Ruth's Chris steakhouse."