{"product_id":"9781617030833","title":"The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak: A New Orleans Family Memoir","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak\u003c\/i\u003e 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!\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThese 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University Press of Mississippi","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47148381044976,"sku":"9781617030833","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781617030833_p0.jpg?v=1763849719","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781617030833","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}