At Emeril’s Restaurant, a father’s legacy, a son’s ambition, a New Orleans icon's next act

From a table at Emeril’s Restaurant, diners can catch glimpses of the cavernous, gleaming kitchen at work. It’s a choreography of cooks in formal whites moving between steel tables, roaring stoves and racks of hanging pots as plates make their way through a progression of specialized stations.

Before any dish reaches the dining room, it goes to a table called the pass, where the chefs in charge that night give a final assessment.

Often these days, Emeril Lagasse himself is working the pass. On those nights, the celebrity chef is joined in these duties by a new collaborator, one who could not be closer to him but is also challenging him to change his game.

That is his son E.J. Lagasse.

At age 20, he is too young to legally drink, yet the younger Lagasse has taken a pivotal role guiding the evolution of a New Orleans restaurant known around the world.

As E.J. added the final garnish to a giant raviolo filled with local shrimp and smoky tasso cream one night, Emeril called out for another course from the line and gave a close inspection to a delicate cake shaped like a magnolia blossom.

Between the courses, a story of family, legacy and ambition plays out.

“I hear the stories about my dad, about how crazy he was in the ‘90s but also about what he accomplished, which is incredible,” E.J. Lagasse said.

“I’m fascinated by what he did then, and he’s fascinated by what we’re doing now. And at the end of the day, what we’re trying to do is create something here that will make New Orleans proud.”

Revamping a legend

There have been many changes to Lagasse‘s company through the pandemic, which had a tumultuous impact on the hospitality business. Two of his New Orleans restaurants, Emeril’s Delmonico and NOLA in the French Quarter, closed permanently.

Meanwhile, Emeril's on Tchoupitoulas Street, the chef's first restaurant and the flagship for his company, has changed greatly. E.J.’s impact here is a big reason why (see the related column on what it's like to dine at Emeril's today here).

The restaurant was shuttered for 19 months through the crisis, reopening in the fall of 2021 with a whole new staff and a new menu. Last summer, after E.J. joined the staff, it introduced a new concept altogether.

Emeril's overall is more lux and refined, with higher-touch service and more dishes that dazzle visually even before the first bite. It has only about half the seats as before, in order to focus the attention of the staff more fully on a smaller number of diners. It is also more expensive.

Emeril’s now serves a series of set-course, chef’s tasting menus. There’s a three-course edition for $95, and a pair of seven-course menus – one seasonal, the other dubbed “classic” – for $155 and $160 respectively. Add wine pairings and dinner for two at the new Emeril’s will easily exceed $500.

The restaurant’s bar and lounge, now called the Salon, is a relatively casual option, serving a more conventional, a la carte menu with dishes like gumbo, duck pot pie and mussels carbonara, and small plate extravagances like caviar and foie gras. Dining at the Salon is the only way to pick your own courses here now; in the main dining room, the meal is entirely up to the chefs.

Emeril Lagasse said the new direction reflects his thinking on where the highest level of American fine dining should be now, and how New Orleans should be represented in its ranks.

“How do you come back from the pandemic, with everything so much more expensive now? A lot of people are talking about how you do it more cheaply. Well, I don’t know how to do that, so we went the opposite direction,” Emeril Lagasse said.

An icon, chasing a star

It feels like a restaurant in pursuit of a Michelin star, widely considered the highest mark for fine dining around the world. That is not possible right now. The French-based Michelin Guide dispatches its reviewers to just a select number of American cities, and New Orleans is not in that number. But the list of cities is growing, with Miami and Orlando added in the past year.

Emeril Lagasse believes New Orleans restaurants should be up for this level of assessment, and his son believes their reinvented flagship restaurant would be a clear contender were that the case. E.J. grows animated when discussing the possibilities of helping accomplish this dream for his father.

“Through the years, we’d go to these restaurants as a family and I’d hear dad say if only we had this in New Orleans,” E.J. said. “Now we decided that we were ready to do this as a family and we can swing for the fences.”

Despite his young age, E.J. Lagasse has already graduated from culinary school and has worked stages, or culinary internships, at Michelin-starred restaurants in New York, London and Stockholm.

“What he's learned in his journeys, he brought that here. He brought it back to make our restaurant better. That's what's so cool about this,” Emeril Lagasse said.

One example is the pass in the kitchen. E.J. redesigned it, making sure a team of chefs examines each dish, and modeled its workflow after systems he saw work during his time at Michelin star restaurants.

‘He’s the real deal’

E.J. is the only one of Emeril Lagasse’s four children to join the family business. The chef’s two daughters from a prior marriage work in other fields. His youngest daughter Meril, now a high school senior, is the namesake for another of Emeril's restaurants in New Orleans; but her father says she’s expressed no interest in the business.

Others outside the Lagasse organization have seen E.J. in action and came away impressed. One is Eric Ripert, the chef of the three-Michelin star restaurant Le Bernardin in New York. Lagasse worked a stage here during a summer break in high school.

“He’s the real deal for sure. He has this incredible maturity and passion,” said Ripert. “There’s a very bright future for the legacy of the Lagasse family there.”

Ripert, who grew up in France, started his own culinary career at 15 and feels some kinship with the younger Lagasse’s journey.

“You take a shortcut when you start that young,” he said. “He’s creative, and with the guidance of Emeril he’ll be able to be himself. He’s on his way to do that, and he’s lucky to have a father who expresses his love with the support for him to do this.”

“Keeping us all young”

Emeril Lagasse, now 63, is among the most famous chefs in the world, and the most influential. The Massachusetts native made his name in New Orleans as chef at Commander’s Palace, starting in that role young himself, at just 23.

He opened Emeril’s in a then-edgy part of the Warehouse District in 1990 and soon embarked on a television career, drawing the template for the modern celebrity chef.

It might seem natural for his son to follow in his footsteps, though both father and son say there was no pressure to do so. In fact, E.J. says his father was cool on that prospect when he first started exploring a culinary career.

“I told my dad when I was 10 years old that I wanted to be a chef. He said ‘are you sure?’” he recalls. “He said I couldn’t start out working for him.”

E.J. was adamant that he wanted to work in cuisine, and he stuck to the path. Today he works for his father, and with his father, along with a team of top chefs at the restaurant. That includes Tim Alvarez, culinary director for Lagasse’s company and an alum of Le Bernardin, and longtime Emeril’s chefs David Slater and Chris Fagan. Slater said E.J. has added a new spark to these collaborations.

“He’s keeping us all young,” he said. “It’s really impressive, and all of us feel it.”

Emeril has watched his son’s first forays into the business with a mixture of pride and professional rigor. He acknowledges that E.J. has shaken things up in the kitchen, and he thinks that’s a good thing.

“I know his pacing and enthusiasm can be a little much for some people,” Lagasse said. “He's so young and so eager, he just goes so fast. I know that might rub some people the wrong way. But not me.”

While Lagasse puts in time at his other restaurants in Las Vegas and Miramar Beach, Florida, when he’s in New Orleans he takes a direct role in the dishes his son and the other chefs are creating at Emeril’s Restaurant.

E.J., who is now working on Szechuan-style Gulf fish for the upcoming winter menu, said he always waits anxiously for his father’s appraisal.

“He’ll say ‘OK, fix this part,’ and he’s always right,” E.J. said. “But sometimes he’ll taste a dish and say ‘well, this is spot on. Great job, gang.’ And I tell you, there’s nothing that feels better than that.”

+20

Ian McNulty: Emeril’s goes even more upscale. See what it’s like to dine here now

The gumbo is a shrimp and okra version with a deeply flavored roux that might’ve come from the stove at a Louisiana bayou home, if not for its…

Love New Orleans food? Pull up a seat at the table. Join Where NOLA Eats, the hub for food and dining coverage in New Orleans.

Follow Where NOLA Eats on Instagram at @wherenolaeats, join the Where NOLA Eats Facebook group and subscribe to the free Where NOLA Eats biweekly newsletter here.