A Woman's Place by Deepi Ahluwalia

Author:Deepi Ahluwalia [AHLUWALIA, DEEPI/FERRARI, STEF]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2019-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

Ruth Fertel

• 1927-2002 •

THE SIZZLE OF A steak is music to many a diner’s ears. But because of one Louisiana woman’s life’s work, it became the sound of success for thousands of people around the world. At the helm of Ruth’s Chris Steak House, Ruth Fertel turned a struggling restaurant into a business empire with a philanthropic spirit.

By the time she was nineteen, Ruth had taken home a degree from Louisiana State University in physics and chemistry with honors. Later, she became a licensed horse trainer—the first woman in Louisiana to do so. When her divorce left her with two children to support on her meager salary as a lab technician at Tulane University, Ruth did something bold. An ad in the New Orleans Times-Picayune announced the sale of a failed restaurant, Chris Steak House, in a somewhat seedy neighborhood near the racetrack. Disregarding the advice of those around her, Ruth mortgaged her home and purchased the place in 1965. In a single year, she doubled the restaurant’s annual earnings.

Without any experience in the food world, the woman who became known as the Empress of Steak (who stood a petite five foot two) taught herself to butcher massive cuts of meat, mix drinks, and make dressings, and her restaurant began to thrive. But it was a magnet for trouble. Shortly after it opened, Hurricane Betsy devastated the area, and soon after, Ruth took a bullet in the shoulder from a would-be robber. Then, in 1976, a fire destroyed the restaurant. But it took Ruth all of a single week to reopen, rechristening the establishment Ruth’s Chris Steak House in an adjacent space, her regulars barely missing a meal.

The world of steak was a man’s domain, both at the table and behind the scenes, but that didn’t faze Ruth; her restaurant revolutionized the way beef was prepared and served. She was obsessive about quality, following the supply chain to ensure every steak she served was specially dry-aged, and designed a custom broiler that seared her steaks at a whopping 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Her signature was topping each steak with a pat of seasoned butter that, when served on a 500-degree slate, sizzled all the way to the table. At a time when fine-dining restaurants were staffed by men, her servers were nearly all female—many of them single mothers, like her. The waitresses were known as the Broads on Broad Street, and they served the area’s movers and shakers: politicians, musicians, and artists, as well as the journalists who considered Ruth’s ground zero for getting a scoop.

In 1977, Ruth’s business began its transformation from a neighborhood hot spot to an international empire, as she turned her exacting standards into a system that could be reproduced in franchises around the world. Over the two decades that followed, Ruth’s Chris grew to encompass more than eighty restaurants from New Orleans to New York, Hong Kong to Dubai. Even as the brand grew, Ruth emphasized the importance of community and equality of opportunity. Her proudest

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