THE FOUNTAIN OF RUTH

By Sarah Baird

The concept of steak as a “masculine” food has been seared into America’s public consciousness for decades, back-slapping and handshaking its way into the culinary zeitgeist ever since the first cowboy novels depicted their rootin’-tootin’ heroes as steer wranglers who butchered beef by hand then cooked it up around a fire with their fellow Stetson-wearers. Steakhouses—the first of which was established in Manhattan in 1868—soon followed suit, marketing themselves over the course of the 20th century as spaces where men could mingle freely, wheeling and dealing over expensive filets in burgundy-and-leather clad rooms thick with cigar smoke and the clink of highball glasses. Can you imagine, after all, Mad Men without Don Draper frequenting Keen’s Steakhouse or The Palm for a ribeye and a martini (or five)? Didn’t think so.

Even through the mid-2000s, the trope that women do not order red meat—particularly on a first date—was still so prevalent that The New York Times believed it to be worthy of a trend-piece that women were (gasp!) springing for steak over a few limp lettuce leaves. “Salad, it seems, is out. Gusto, medium rare, is in,” writes Allen Salkin in a 2007 piece with the galling headline, “Be Yourselves, Girls, Order the Rib-Eye.” One particularly riveting passage from the article: “[Some] say ordering a salad displays an unappealing mousiness. ‘It seems wimpy, insipid, childish,’ said Michelle Heller, 34, a copy editor at TV Guide. ‘I don’t want to be considered vapid and uninteresting.’ Ordering meat, on the other hand, is a declarative statement, something along the lines of ‘I am woman, hear me chew.’”

“I’ve been shocked at the number of women actually ordering steak,” Michael Stillman, vice president of concept development for the Smith & Wollensky Restaurant Group, says further down in the same article. “The meat is appealing to them, much more than what I saw two or three years ago… they are going for our bone-in sirloin and our cowboy-cut rib steak.”

In New Orleans, though—a city with serious old-school steakhouse culture, from the bright neon of Crescent City Steaks on Broad to 1930s neighborhood gem

Charlie’s Steak House—women have long been central to the furtive, curtained booths and carnivorous appetites of the city’s meatiest establishments. And chief among them is the whip-smart, tenacious founder of Ruth’s Chris Steak House, Ruth Fertel.

“New Orleans is a city of aristocracies, both competing and intertwined...[and] the culinary aristocracy’s stature comes not from bloodlines but from sweat,” writes Ruth’s son, Randy Fertel, in his 2011 book, The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak: A New Orleans Family Memoir. “All bowed, when hungry and thirsty, to the three queens of New Orleans cuisine: Ella Brennan of Commander's Palace, Leah Chase of Dooky Chase’s and Ruth Fertel of Ruth's Chris, my mother. Only these three women, earthy and hard-working, seemed not to care a whit about pretense. Which increased their power. You need to talk to Miz Ruth? Well, here she is.”

Born Ruth Udstad in Happy Jack, Louisiana, in 1925, Ruth displayed the kind of competitive quick-wittedness from a young age that would eventually help her succeed in going toe-to-toe with the inflated male egos of the restaurant business, all while ensuring customer service—whether her guests were governors, groundskeepers or grocers—was always paramount.

“Mom grew up a tomboy, determined never to be outdone by her big brother,” Fertel writes. “She skipped two grades...learning, she explained, by listening in on the grades ahead of her. She always claimed she got her competitive spirit from her dad. Just tell me I can't do something, and I will do everything in the world to do it.”

Prior to launching her restaurant empire, Ruth lived several entirely full, unique lifetimes: graduating from LSU at the ripe old age of 19 with a degree in chemistry and taking a whirlwind honeymoon with her new husband, Rodney Fertel; becoming licensed as the first female thoroughbred trainer in Louisiana with two young sons in tow; and, after her divorce, working as a lab technician at Tulane Medical School. It was during this time that she stumbled upon a listing in the classifieds that announced the sale of a well-known New Orleans steakhouse— a business that had been turned over (and back) multiple times before, though Fertel was unaware of its history. She was immediately attracted to the concept.

“I was so naïve. I didn’t have any special interests besides hunting, fishing and reading, and it didn’t sound like I could make much money out of any of them. I saw lots of ads for service stations, but that wasn’t for me. Neither were the bars that were listed,” Ruth later recalled. But when she ran across the advertisement for Chris Steak House in 1965, a spark lit up inside of her. “I said to myself, ‘Simple menu. I know I can do that.’ I had eaten there. The food was really good, and it had a great reputation. So, I went to the restaurant and met with the owner. I asked him, ‘How much do you want?’ He said $18,000, and I said I would buy it. I didn’t have any money, but I had my home.”

Armed with a convivial personality and dogged determination to succeed, Ruth cut steaks (first by hand, then with an electric bandsaw), oversaw front-of-house operations for the 60-seat restaurant and kept a close watch on the books, proving herself to be a true one-woman-show in the early years. She also hired an almost-entirely female waitstaff, including many single moms, a move that proved from the beginning Fertel wasn’t going to be doing things the same way as the “good old boys” club.

“As business grew, Mom added more waitresses: Lou Dufrense (under five feet), Carol Held (Boston-Irish and called Yankee), brassy Theresa Arena, tiny Lois Oxman, Shirley Barlett and Faye Pastrano...a feisty redhead who cruised the floor [and] had once been married to flashy light-heavyweight champion Willie Pastrano who fought for the Mob,” Fertel writes of his mother’s core team of ladies.

Ruth also knew how to turn setbacks into brand-defining moments. Nowhere is this more obvious than her—necessary, but ingenious—rebranding of the business as Ruth’s Chris Steak House.

“You've wolfed down the 16-ounce New York strip; you've consumed the one-pound baked potato; you've even managed the chocolate praline encore. Now, as you sit back, satiated and content, a burning question lingers: what's the deal with this restaurant's name?” Anne Faircloth wrote of the tongue-twister of a name for Fortune Magazine in 1998. “’Ruth's Chris Steak House’ is so unwieldy that one restaurant critic suggested it would make a great sobriety test. If you can't say it three times, put down that martini.”

After a fire destroyed the original Chris Steak House in 1976, Ruth planned to move the entire business to a larger space with more room down the street. Her contract, however, stipulated that the name “Chris Steak House” could only be used in the exact, initial location. With only a week to come up with a solution—and not wanting to lose name recognition or her customer base—Fertel settled on “Ruth’s Chris Steak House” to combine familiarity with a notso-subtle wink that a new generation of restaurateur—a woman—was in charge. "I've always hated the name," Fertel told Fortune. "But we've always managed to work around it…[and] make the steak the star."

The differences in how Ruth operated her steakhouse were not limited to a new brand of exclusive, but familial, atmosphere: it was also in the food itself. The steaks quickly became known for their signature sizzle (it’s practically impossible to imagine a perfectly medium-rare Ruth’s Chris ribeye crackling and popping in your ears and not salivate, Pavlov’s dog–style) as well as a litany of side dishes, like the aforementioned (and everpopular) one-pound baked potato or decadent creamed spinach. She also elevated the conversation among customers and competitors about why selecting high-quality steaks mattered, making meat the very core of what brought the customers in for dinner and what kept bringing them back.

“Early on, Mom realized that she needed to educate the marketplace. Quarter- and half-page print ads explained why only 2% of the beef raised in America was good enough for [her] customers,” writes Randy Fertel. “No less a personage than Arnie Morton, founder of Morton's Steak House, her chief competitor, once told me that 'Ruth Fertel created the prime steak business’— this despite the fact his father was selling steaks in the 1920s.”

And as franchises spread, Fertel’s commitment to elevating her female employees, colleagues and confidantes was evident with each new dining room that opened across South Louisiana.

“As the restaurants expanded in New Orleans, Mom promoted her waitresses and other female friends to run them. Ruth's college roommate Gloria, not her brother Sig, shared half-ownership in Chris II across the river in Gretna. Bette ran Vets on Veterans Highway in Fat City, a booming area of Metairie—until she was caught with her hand in her till. When Mom reopened four blocks up Broad and Orleans after the fire, Myrtle ran the restored original at Broad and Ursuline. Upon Myrtle's death, Doris took over until her hand, too, was caught in the till. She spent some years in the wilderness and then was forgiven. Ruth trusted her girls...[but] she kept a tight rein on bills, inventory and receipts.”

Every Ruth’s Chris restaurant that popped up across the country—from the first franchise in Baton Rouge to Las Vegas and beyond—arrived with a dining room atmosphere that was decked out to reflect the unique location, whether catering to oil tycoons in Houston or outdoorsy-types in the Rocky Mountains. Ruth knew that to help foster the intimacy, camaraderie and “club-house” feeling that the original Ruth’s Chris had in spades, the individual locations had to play to what made them each uniquely special—not try to duplicate what made the New Orleans outpost magical.

This approach—combined, of course, with the restaurant’s luxurious, top-tier menu— caused restaurants to multiply hand-overfist. Today, there are over 150 Ruth’s Chris outposts across the globe from Puerto Rico to Toronto and everywhere in-between, as a leap-of-faith life choice of a scrappy single mother from rural Louisiana has flourished into a publicly traded hospitality empire. (RUTH is the ticker symbol, naturally.)

“When I started franchising, that really got the name out,” Ruth explained of the business model, “and the more the name became known, the busier we became in all our restaurants. Our name recognition spread. In fact, all our franchisees were people who had eaten at one time or another in one of our restaurants. We never looked for franchisees. They came to us.”

Fertel died of lung cancer in 2002, leaving behind a legacy that helped completely change the role of women in restaurant culture. Thanks in no small part to Ruth’s trailblazing, there have been major cultural shifts in recent years surrounding how steakhouses talk about their restaurants, advertise them and even build their spaces, with chefs and owners now creating dining environments that are less focused on gender exclusivity and more on what matters: great food in inclusive, welcoming places that aren’t served up with a side of sexism.

Sarah Baird is the author of multiple books including New Orleans Cocktails and Flask, which was released in summer 2019. A 2019 Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, her work has been featured in The New York Times, Washington Post, Saveur, Eater, Food & Wine and The Guardian, among others. Previously, she served as restaurant critic for the New Orleans alt-weekly, Gambit Weekly, where she won Critic of the Year in 2015 for her dining reviews.