Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (35 page)

There's been lots written over the years about my mother, trying to explain
her incredible success. She bought a little restaurant, Chris Steak House, and
succeeded, the story goes, because of her hard work and incredible intelligence and spirit and charisma in creating an international empire called
Ruth's Chris Steak House. But to some extent that describes rather than explains. The more interesting question is how to explain that intelligence and
spirit and charisma. What made it all work, what motivated it, what was the
mainspring that made that clock tick?

I want to try to begin to answer those questions by talking about a paradox,
the paradox of memory, which in its nature is about absence, but also about
the attempt to bring what is absent into presence, into the here and now. Food
always tries to have it both ways. It is always about the past, and it is always
about presence, at least when we're doing what we're supposed to be doing
when we eat, that is, enjoying ourselves, using our senses and our spirit, as
Molly O'Neill would say. But if food is about presence, food and its traditions
are also about memory. What meal can we cook that is not an attempt either
to recreate or to avoid recreating our mother's table? Presence and absence are
inextricable, a woven braid. Memory is about absence, things no longer in our
lives, and the effort to bring them into presence. Presence is about the here
and now, ignoring, or seeming to ignore, past and future. My mother managed to combine these two.

For me here to invoke my mother's presence, surely I must begin with her
guts, of which she had a large measure. Or her zeppolahs, those round donuts
Italians serve at street fairs, as her longtime friend and fellow restaurateur Joe
Segretta put it. "She had 'em big as zeppolahs," Joe announced one Friday over
lunch at Peristyle. Big brass ones.

And surely the best story about her brass and guts is the one about the time she beat Carlos Marcello's nephew at gin. Yes, Carlos Marcello, the head of the
New Orleans mafia and, in the minds of many, the man behind the Kennedy
assassination. Mom was a great storyteller, but often you had to pull the tales
out of her. This was one I got her to tell every time we drove to Mosca's, the
wonderful Italian restaurant out in the country known for its, shall I say, colorful past. Mama Mosca had come from Sicily via Al Capone's kitchen to be
Carlos Marcello's cook, till he gave her permission to cook her chicken grande
for the larger world. So I'm driving her to Mosca's with my kids, and I say,
"Mom, tell Matt and Owen about the gin rummy game with Carlos Marcello's
nephew."

"Yeah," she said, "he brought his nephew in and said he wanted me to play
him one sheet of gin for $15,000. I said, I don't play for those kinda stakes. But
he insisted, so we played, and though a sheet usually takes half an hour, I had
him skunked in ten minutes. Then Carlos insisted I give him a chance to get
his money back. `But you said one sheet,' I said. But he insisted, so we played
again. And ten minutes later, it was $30,000."

"So, Mom," I asked, dragging it out of her, "what happened?"

"Well, he was slow to pay."

"So what did you do?"

"Well, I called Carlos, and he sent my money over."

That's my mom. Brass ones, big and shiny enough to dun Carlos Marcello.
I wonder if she insisted on the vig. I never thought to ask. And, by the way,
would you have had the phone number-let alone the balls-to call Carlos
Marcello?

Mom did not mince words. I was about eighteen when I heard my mother
say on one end of a telephone conversation about some business deal that had
gone awry that she thought she was getting "screwed," and, "at least I like to
get kissed when I'm screwed." It was then that I knew for a certainty that my
mom was cool in ways that moms weren't ordinarily cool.

Brassy, salty, cool. No doubt about any of them-and each of them in
spades. But, mainly, to understand my mother's presence I must talk about
another of her qualities that was at once brassy, salty, cool, and pure velvet.
For at the heart of her presence was her presentness, how she was there, here,
now, with you, not somewhere else calculating where she wanted to get or
what she wanted from you, nor stuck in some past elsewhere working a
grudge rather than experiencing the moment. She was present tense all the
way. Here. Now.

This made her a great businesswoman and a great traveling companion, always there, riding the edge of the present moment, open to what comes, fear less. When she came back a couple years ago from a fancy cruise in the
Mediterranean I asked her how the food was, expecting to hear raves about
the cruise ship. "Awful," she said, but added, "One time we got off the boat
somewhere in Greece, and I had the best tomato salad of my life." And there
they were: the juicy tomatoes and the feta and olive oil and salt right there before you, and the light of the Greek islands flooding the moment. That was the
essence of my mother, the lady from Happy Jack, Louisiana. A tomato salad
eaten not in the first-class dining salon but in some marketplace in some
nameless, podunk Greek town. In my family we argue about the proper way
to cut a Creole tomato, those wonderful fruits of the dark alluvial soil of her
native Plaquemines Parish. For Mom everything-here, now-mattered. God
is in the details. All of the details. And now she's gone, having missed the Creole tomato season that started as she lay dying.

Another way she was present was that, whoever you were, she made no effort to stand above you. Be you grand or not so grand she assumed you were
on equal footing with her and she with you. She didn't pull rank. I can't tell
you how many times as I traveled from steak house to steak house around the
country, how many servers and kitchen workers approached me and said,
You know, I have to tell you: the first time I saw your mother at this restaurant's opening, she was peeling shrimp." They'd say, "There she was, the Empress of Steaks, and everyone was in the weeds, and she saw the need to peel
shrimp, and she jumped right in." From that they knew they were in the right
place.

Somehow Mom transferred her gift of presence to the people who worked
for her and the dishes she served and the tables she set and the restaurants she
created around the country. This was part of the magic of Ruth's Chris. Maybe
it's the sizzle that does it, but, anyway, in another sense this presence, this presentness, was the sizzle, the essence of the sizzle, the presence that sizzle helps
create and that the sizzle expresses. In this world of cookie-cutter dining and
generic interstates everywhere, with Ruth's Chris you are somewhere when
you get there. Even on North Broad Street at the very center of New Orleans's
oh-so-elegant Mid-City, where Mom not only founded her empire but had
her home, right behind the restaurant. You don't need to be somewhere else.
This is the place, this is where the magic is. Don't look over your shoulder, because it's happening right here. Right now. That's what Mom created. It was
an expression of the magic of her presentness.

I know the magic worked not just because of the incredible numbers:
eighty-five restaurants, the largest upscale restaurant family in the world. I
know it also or all the more so because of what people tell me they experience at Ruth's Chris. When I managed the flagship on Broad Street, I can't tell you
how many people came up and offered the same litany: "When I was a kid,
Chris Steak House was my favorite restaurant; when I dated my wife, we ate
here, and when I asked her to marry me it was here; when she announced our
first child was in the oven, it was here, and all our daughter's birthday parties
are here. Now it's her favorite restaurant." Woven into the fabric of our lives,
Ruth's Chris is about personal histories like that which are now part of the
magic and keep it alive and are part of her legacy; and they exist because of the
magic she created with her very special presence.

New Orleanians, when they dine-which is what they mostly do-have a
habit of discussing other great meals they've enjoyed at other great restaurants. I suspect when they dine at my mother's table they are more likely to
talk about past Ruth's Chris meals or the next one. Why let your mind wander
anywhere else? That was part of her gift to us. Presence. A model of how to live
life, to the hilt, in the present moment, burning always with a hard, gemlike
flame. That was my mother.

"There is not a road ahead," writes Nellie Morton. "We make the road as we
go. Maybe the journey is not so much a journey ahead but into presence." My
mother certainly never articulated this wisdom to herself or anyone, and yet
she lived it. It helps explain one of the paradoxes of her incredible business career. She had no plan. The empire was built by accident, always in reaction to
the present moment. I once heard Francis Ford Coppola answer the question,
why did he do all those different things, why not just make films? He said,
"The thing that makes me a good filmmaker is the same thing that makes me
open restaurants in San Francisco and resorts in Belize and make wines in
Napa Valley: you must be open to what presents itself." My mother had the
same brilliance, a brilliance that is diminished by planning. Plan, and you
aren't open to what presents itself. A fire closes her first restaurant? Well, I'll
open in my catering hall four blocks away. Which she did, in one week. A good
customer gets tired of having to drive in from Baton Rouge for a good steak
and proposes she allow him to open his own franchise in Prairieville, Louisiana (in the midst of the chemical patch near the capital), and the next thing
you know the franchises outnumber her own stores. And, of course, the most
impressive shortsightedness of all: buy a seventeen-table restaurant for
$18,ooo and have to be convinced by the banker to borrow $22,000, "because
you may need some working capital," and the next thing you know she is selling her company for upwards of nine figures. My mother didn't have foresight. She didn't have a business plan. She had presence.

Presence. Presentness. But to some extent that describes her success rather than explains it. The prior question is, what made it all work, what motivated
it, what was the mainspring that made that clock tick?

Which brings me back to memory and to my mother's roots in the marshy
terrain at the mouth of the Mississippi River, deep in the lower Delta, at
Happy Jack, Louisiana. For the more I look at my mother's story, and the
more my researches take me into my mother's family of origin, then the more
I become convinced that Mom's success was in a crucial way an act of
memory, her attempt to recreate in spirit the cornucopian table of her greatgrandmother. So my new, adjusted view is that my mother's success is best explained by this tension between memory and presence.

Happy Jack, where Mom was born, has its foothold on a little sliver of land
surrounded by river on one side and bayou and marsh on the other. The
marsh they call prairie, from the French pre, as in Grand Pre, the town in
Nova Scotia where the Acadiens' troubles first began in 1755. But the Frenchmen of the lower delta were probably mostly not from that grand derangement
but from the littler troubles (especially the threat of German conscription)
that plagued Alsace at about the same time. They fled first to the "German
Coast" (la Cote des Allemands) up river above New Orleans and then slowly
found their way to the fecund soils and waters of the lower delta. In their
minds they were "French-French," not Cajuns.

The lower delta brims with a great diversity of foodstuffs, and these Alsatians knew what to do with it as much as the Cajuns did: redfish and trout and
shrimp and crab and oyster, duck and geese and dove and quail, deer and rabbit and alligator. And oranges, the best oranges in America, a little-known
fact, and from which at least three generations of our family made orange
wine that was fermented dry and that packed a wallop: 18 percent alcohol and
up. Mom's mother's family, being Alsatian on both sides, brought to the table
a cooking tradition that's just about unbeatable. The great cook in the family,
according to family lore, was Mom's great-grandmother, who lived in the next
town downriver, Home Place (you've got to love these names), and who raised
Mom's mother, and who every Thanksgiving and Christmas laid a table that
started with gumbo and ran through daube and crown pork roast and piqued
duck and rabbit, fried sweet and Idaho potatoes, broccoli and cauliflower an
gratin. The stuffed turkey was almost an afterthought, a token gesture made
to merely local tradition. The piece de resistance was oyster dressing made, as
my mother's first cousin Audrey Cascio writes in her memoir, "in a giant
washtub with seventeen sacks of oysters that had been fished by the men in the
family from the bottom of the bayou and then shucked." It ended with half a
dozen pies and cakes. All this was cooked in a house with neither electricity nor gas, on a wood burning stove and in an oven, my cousin exclaims, "with
no thermostat!" Sometimes thirty-five people attended these affairs.