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

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“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 National Book Award–winning 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 who’s 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 O’NAN 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 family’s thrive-and-survive presence on the lip of a watery grave, Randy Fertel gives us a palpable sense of its essence—as 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 you’re not careful, you’ll 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 HBO’s Treme, co-producer PBS’s 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 can’t live without, than Randy Fertel? Ruth and Rodney’s child, who suffered and gloried terribly at their hands, is New Orleans’s 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 This page intentionally left blank THE GORILLA MAN AND THE EMPRESS OF STEAK A N E W O R L E A N S FA M I LY M E M O I R R A N D Y F E R T E L U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S O F M I S S I S S I P P I / J A C K S O N 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...