Q & A with Tom Fitzmorris

by Anne Honeywell

Our own Tom Fitzmorris is very, very busy. So, when I had the chance to sit down with him one-on-one, I didn’t hesitate. Read on to learn more about this man of many talents.

Tom: The #1 question I am asked is, “Which is the best restaurant in town right now?” My answers: If you mean my favorite restaurant, my answer is Antoine’s. If you mean the restaurant that achieves the highest standards of taste, service and environment, that would be Commander’s Palace.

Tom: I was a writer for The Driftwood, the campus newspaper at UNO, in the late 1970s. I was inspired by a professor there, Richard Collin, who in his free time published the New Orleans Underground Gourmet. I didn’t understand the pleasures of the table until I read Collin’s book—although I loved the idea of dining in restaurants. He turned me on to the food world, and it was straight upward ever since. My strongest ambition was to be a radio personality. It was my coverage of the food beat that led to my first job in radio, in 1974.

Tom: I go out to eat in all kinds of restaurants. When I finish the repast, I try to numerically decide how good it was relative to other comparable restaurants. I pay for the meals myself. I don’t take free meals, and I have never had any kind of expense account. So it hurts me as much as it does my readers and listeners.

Tom: No.

Tom: Sometimes. I am pretty easy to spot, even when I take measures to have a secret identity. A lot of people tell me that they can identify me by the sound of my voice. I sound pretty normal to me.

Tom: Some try to do so, but I have ways of rebating the cost of such freebies to the restaurant.

Tom: I never give up on a restaurant. Bad ones become better; good ones get worse. Some don’t change much. It’s hard to keep up with it all. We had 809 restaurants the day before Katrina. Now we have 1,450 or so.

Tom: My favorite food is New Orleans food. Always has been.

Tom: I like all genres of cookery, as long as they are well executed.

Tom: I’ll try anything once, at least, and go back even to bad restaurants if I think there might be development.

Tom: The best reason to learn cooking is that it frees you to create dishes that are exactly the way you like them to taste without concerning yourself about the tastes of others.

Tom: No. There weren’t such organizations back in the America of the 1970s.

Tom: I had two lavish dinners in Alsace, northwestern France. A restaurant there called Auberge de l’Ill was being called the best restaurant in the world. I met the owner-chef’s family when they visited New Orleans. He invited me to get in touch next time I was in France. I had dinner that night and lunch the next afternoon. It lived up to its reputation.

Tom: Yes—we are celebrating 30 years. It all began at 10 a.m. on July 18, 1988, when I signed on the air with the first edition of The Food Show with Tom Fitzmorris. I had been hired by the lady who, eight months later, would marry me—Mary Ann Connell. She was managing WSMB at the time and was looking for some new talent. She also had been hosting her own talk show for as long as I had. A few weeks later, she quit that gig, but I kept doing mine, three or four hours a day. I’m still doing my show every weekday for two to four hours. I survived all the changes in the station. After 30 years with the same station, same concept, and the same host, I am still there. The only interruption was the first week after Katrina. Most days, I broadcast from the radio station in New Orleans as normal. But on weekends and Mondays I do the show from the Cool Water Ranch—the nickname of the house in Abita Springs where my wife Mary Ann, daughter Mary Leigh and I live. I use a rig that makes me sound as though I’m in the studio. It sounds so good that I can act as an anchor in times of emergencies. For example, mine was the voice of WWL Radio from midnight until six in the morning when Katrina hit. That, combined with the HD Radio technology we use nowadays, makes it sound like I’m at the table with you. This saves me a lot of time commuting. The reason I broadcast remotely on Mondays is that it’s rehearsal night for the Northlake Performing Arts Society. I sing tenor in this organization, which has been around for 22 years now, with maestro and soprano Alissa Rowe conducting. NPAS has about 100 singers, many of whom are classically trained. I am not one of those. But being in a chorus with so many excellent singers helps me sing better than I otherwise would. I also like to sing whenever I spy a possible victim. This is often a complete stranger or someone calling me on the radio. My favorite music is from the Great American Songbook—from which Sinatra got most of his inspirations.

Tom: My main interest is what I do for a living: food, cooking, wine, and travel, under the name “The New Orleans Eat Club.” We’ve had dozens of wine dinners and twenty-eight cruises around the world, each with around fifty fellow cruisers. We’ve covered the Caribbean, the Panama Canal, Central America, most of Europe, Scandinavia and the eastern Mediterranean. Our most popular cruise is coming up again this October, as we go to Boston, New England and Canada, all during the foliage season. I also have written several major cookbooks, most of which are still in publication: Andrea’s Extra-Virgin Recipes. Tom Fitzmorris’s New Orleans Food, third publication, just out this spring. The New Orleans Eat Book, a restaurant guide, the biggest of a total of eight other such books. Hungry Town, hard-cover memoir of my career, with emphasis on Katrina. Lost Restaurants of New Orleans, book about well-remembered restaurants that are no longer around, written with Peggy Scott Laborde.

Tom: You wouldn’t believe how many times people have asked me that, as if I am already in the electric chair. The answer: an unlimited number of ice-cold, very big Louisiana raw oysters.