Tom Fitzmorris, the prolific and persnickety New Orleans restaurant critic who spent three hours a day, five days a week discussing food on his radio show and wrote what by his estimation was America’s longest-running weekly restaurant review column by a single author, died on Feb. 12 in New Orleans. He was 74.
His wife, Mary Ann Connell, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, which he had had for a decade.
Mr. Fitzmorris was one of those colorful, only-in-New Orleans personalities who would have to be invented if they didn’t already exist. And invent himself is essentially what he did, parlaying a savant’s mastery of New Orleans restaurant menus and a love of the spotlight into a career that spanned five decades.
“If Tom was 30 years old today, he would be the No. 1 food influencer and have 30 million followers,” said Justin Kennedy, the general manager at Parkway Bakery & Tavern, where the po’ boys, the city’s favorite sandwich, rank among the best. Mr. Kennedy grew up listening to Mr. Fitzmorris, who eventually invited him to step in as an occasional substitute host of his radio show.
Mr. Fitzmorris ate out almost every day, always in a sports coat and tie. Many mornings, he would write 4,000 words before he headed out to do “The Food Show With Tom Fitzmorris,” on WSMB. (He began his radio career in 1978, at WGSO, but was hired in 1988 to start “The Food Show” at WSMB by the station’s program director, Ms. Connell, who would later become his wife.) For the next three hours, he would entertain callers, opine about food and joust with chefs who called in.
The political consultant James Carville, a lifelong New Orleanian, was a fan.
“Being the food critic in the early 21st century in New Orleans was like being the art critic in the late 15th century in Florence,” he said in an interview. “You had a lot to cover.”
Mr. Fitzmorris cultivated friendships with cooks, waiters and the city’s culinary elite. Those relationships led some people to question whether he could be an impartial critic.
Still, many chefs say he pulled no punches, even for the smallest missteps. “The service remains sharp, even after miffing the main server,” he wrote in a 2015 review of the restaurant Trenasse, which had just opened. The sin? She had mispronounced “gnocchi.” Of course, he corrected her.
Mr. Fitzmorris had dozens of rules about the New Orleans culinary canon. Defending them became part of his persona.
“I will hereby state Bread Pudding Rule Number One: When making the custard to soak into the stale bread, figure out the maximum amount you think you’ll need, and use half again as much,” he wrote in one column.
He insisted on referring to the sandwiches most of New Orleans calls po’ boys as “poor boys.” The more formal spelling, he argued, hewed closer to the sandwich’s origin story: During a streetcar strike in the 1920s, a pair of former conductors who had opened a restaurant would say, “Here comes another poor boy,” when one of the strikers walked in. Then they would hand him a free sandwich built on French bread.
Mr. Fitzmorris first tasted Emeril Lagasse’s food in 1982, when the young chef took over the kitchen at Commander’s Palace, which had become the white-hot center of modern Cajun and Creole cooking. He dined there regularly, sitting at a table with Dickie Brennan, one of the restaurant’s owners.
Mr. Lagasse, who went on to open five restaurants in New Orleans, said that Mr. Fitzmorris was always polite, but that he also had an electrifying presence. “He was smart as a whip when it came to food and restaurants, and he was very fair,” he said. “He’s maybe the reason I was known in New Orleans.”
Thomas Gerard Fitzmorris was born in New Orleans on Mardi Gras, Feb. 6, 1951, the second child of Joseph James Fitzmorris, a bookkeeper, and Aline (Gremillion) Fitzmorris, who managed the home. The revered New Orleans musician, jazz historian and physician Edmond Souchon, known as Doc, delivered him.
Except for a six-week period after Hurricane Katrina, when he decamped to Washington, Mr. Fitzmorris never lived anywhere but New Orleans. He attended Jesuit High School until his senior year, when he transferred to Archbishop Rummel High School. In 1974, he graduated from the University of New Orleans, where he studied communications. The same year, he wrote his first restaurant review for the student newspaper, Driftwood. A career was born.
From that point on, until 2020, he wrote weekly restaurant reviews for a variety of publications. In 1996, with the advent of the digital revolution, he turned The New Orleans Menu, a newsletter he started in 1972, into a website.
He also wrote 23 books. He published all of them himself, with two exceptions: the cookbook “Tom Fitzmorris’s New Orleans Food,” published in 2006, and “Hungry Town: A Culinary History of New Orleans, the City Where Food Is Almost Everything,” published in 2010.
In Katrina’s aftermath, he started a restaurant index on his website, fastidiously tracking every restaurant that reopened. The list was both a public service and a beacon of hope for people wondering if the city would ever be the same again.
“If the food came back, everything could come back,” he said in an interview with ABC News in 2015, 10 years after the levees failed.
He held dozens of dinners a year, an event he called Eat Club. Listeners would gather at a restaurant he selected that would assemble a special menu.
He was a constant on local television and festival stages, and at fund-raisers for his Catholic church.
Mr. Fitzmorris had a corny sense of humor, which often involved jokes about the phrase “soup du jour.” (A customer asks what the soup du jour is; the waitress says, “I don’t know. They change it on me every day.”) He also liked to play elaborate April Fool’s pranks. He once made up a new restaurant that he said was opening near Commander’s Palace and described the fictitious competitor with such detailed admiration that Ella Brennan, then an owner of Commander’s Palace, dispatched her daughter, Ti Martin, to investigate.
Ti Martin, now one of the restaurant’s proprietors, remembered him as a particularly harsh critic, not out of meanness but because he wanted things done in a way he perceived as proper. When she ran out of iced tea at a restaurant she had just opened, he went on about it on his show for what she said seemed like an hour.
“But he was right,” she said. “Who runs out of iced tea?”
In addition to his wife, Mr. Fitzmorris is survived by a son, Jude Fitzmorris; a daughter, Mary Leigh Fitzmorris; three sisters, Judy Howat, Karen Terrell and Lynn Fleetwood; and three grandchildren.
He had his annual birthday lunch this month at Commander’s Palace. As always, he dined with his wife, who for 36 years had eaten alongside him. She is also a broadcaster and journalist, and she gently took over the column and the radio show in 2021, when it became clear his disease was too far advanced for him to continue.
Their last meal out together was brunch before the Super Bowl at Restaurant August. He had wings, crispy fried oysters topped with caviar and an order of something the chef called “snapper Pontchartrain.” Dessert was a $28 sundae made with roasted banana ice cream and a pecan tart.
He remarked on the food throughout the meal, Ms. Connell said, and he swooned over the oysters, one of his favorite foods.
“He cared about one thing and one thing only,” she said. “How did things taste.”
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